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PCB007-Jan2021

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JANUARY 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 9 mating inefficient and wasteful processes will not eliminate waste, it will simply make you wasteful at a faster clip. It's up to you to elim- inate the waste from your process. The chal- lenge that faces you is to optimize your pro- cesses before you automate. Even if automa- tion isn't on your technology roadmap, elimi- nating waste from your processes means that you'll make more revenue on less expense; no bad can come of that. In this issue, we kick off our continuous improvement coverage, which continues through 2021. We'll be exploring smarter processes, smarter equipment, automation, and operational efficiencies. We will consid- er "X=X c – 1" from all angles. This month, we begin by establishing why continuous im- provement, in the form of smarter processes, is so critical to our industry. As always, we value talking to our readers. If you have a story of your own related to "X=X c – 1" to share, we'd love to hear it. Reach us at editorial@iconnect007.com. PCB007 Nolan Johnson is managing editor of PCB007 Magazine. Nolan brings 30 years of career experience focused almost entirely on electronics design and manufacturing. To contact Johnson, click here. many new ways to do traditional things, and it can be so very, very immersive. But only if we want it to be. Conversely, I've sat through tedious meet- ings (I'm sure you have, too) that have become even more unbearable for having been moved to a videoconference platform. Boring, poor- ly led meetings simply become all the worse when moved from the physical world and flattened into 2D. I've stopped attending the monthly meetings for one community group I belong to, simply because the group's meeting priority is to socialize more than achieve the club business. Socializing certainly happens, but the business often does not. I argue that we shouldn't blame the video teleconference venue; we must blame the meeting process being used. For those of us who have learned a thing or two about how to run an effective video teleconference, those new practices will transfer into doing a better job in face-to-face meetings as well. But what does all this have to do with print- ed circuit board fabrication? That question leads us to the theme of this issue of PCB007 Magazine: smart processes. No, not smart factories, but smart processes. You may be considering smart factory automa- tion for your company. Just as teleconferences took a bad meeting and made it worse, auto-

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