SMT007 Magazine

SMT-Oct2016

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28 SMT Magazine • October 2016 music would begin to play and the screen image would begin to fade and distort as we were clear- ly going back in time. Early in my profession- al development I came to the stunning realiza- tion that in high-tech electronic product assem- bly, the technical problems were the easy ones to solve. Like a lightning bolt from the blue, it hit me: Could this be? It seemed the problems associated with co-workers' priorities working in different departments and their respective manager's priorities were the difficult ones. Like baby birds vying for their mother manager's/di- rector's attention these issues were much more complex. And worse, they seemed to be intrac- table and unsolvable. Now we begin to approach leadership and see it as a human characteristic, not a job title. In those early days (cue the music again) we just did the near impossible by soldering IC packages whose lead pitch was reduced from 100 mils (0.100 inches or 2.54 mm read last month's column) and, as important, developed the assembly processes that permitted the new devices to be soldered to circuit boards en masse for commercial, high-volume product applica- tions. The dual in-line package (DIP), was used practically from the advent of integrated circuit (IC) packages, to connect the silicon die to the other components in a product's circuitry. They came on the scene after WWII. The need for in- creased pin-out and speed requirements in the early '80s caused product designers to embrace a new commercial plastic package that had been used in a ceramic form by the military for years (the leadless ceramic chip carrier). It had leads on a 50-mil pitch. In addition, the leads didn't go through the board. They were soldered on the same side of the circuit board as the compo- nent body resided. Then came fine pitch… However, the automated assembly equip- ment kept up and, although daunting when in- troduced, developing assembly processes to ac- commodate these new component packages was a reasonable task. Contract manufacturing was beginning to take hold as electronic product design compa- nies tried to avoid the ballooning cost of assem- bling their products—both capital equipment and personnel. One important role of a company's manag- ers is to provide an operational infrastructure that supplies data to permit performance mea- surement. Here is an instructional example of the dif- ference between a poor manager and a leader: In those days, production floor data was not as readily available as it is today. So a concerted ef- fort was needed to understand what a product actually cost to build. It took time and mon- ey to accumulate and track actual costs and use these as a measure against a product's standard cost (hopefully, used to bid on the job). As a manager, an alternate strategy was to whisper under your breath, "the hell with it. I'll just book as much business as I can by what I think it will cost and ship, ship, ship." Or worse, "I'll bid what I think will win the job without regard to its true cost and ship, ship, ship. We'll see at the end of the month if the company made or lost money." Not properly estimating cost be- forehand leads to one of two reactions within an operation when a bid is successful: • Sales/Marketing—We won! Hurray! • Production—We won! Uh oh! The good news is this "strategy" often caused the sales curves to go up and to the right. The bad news is the cost curves would also go up and to the right—at a faster rate. The sales and cost curves would never cross. The more you shipped the more money you lost! It was like wrapping a $10 bill around every product that went out the door! In this case, the manager saw his role as shipping product for maximum revenue, liter- ally, at any cost. The manager's primary objec- tive was ill founded in the context of what was best for the company. " Now we begin to approach leadership and see it as a human characteristic, not a job title. " DO THE HIGH PAID MANAGERS IN YOUR ORGANIZATION ADD VALUE?

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