Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1000349
JULY 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 23 you can better educate and pass on infor- mation in the future. That's something I think doesn't happen enough within the industry. If we then go to customers, and I'm sure Steve has come up against the same things about designers throwing the design to the production people, throwing the design to the quality people, and on and on and on—but it happens so much with customers as well. They pass on information to a contract manu- facturer, and it's only the good contract manu- facturers who say, "Hold on a minute. I want to sit down and talk you through this. I want to make sure that you understand, we're going to build this. We're going to build it to this level of quality or whatever. We can achieve what you want, however these things need to change or these parts need to modify. We need to work together to achieve that." There are, I'm sure, quite a lot of products that contract manufacturers are offered that are turned down because they're not going to see a successful product build in the future, so consequently they're taking on something where they may make money but it's not going to be a long running product. They're investing time to make sure that the customer is successful, and the customers spend time, which very often they don't, in making that investment with their suppliers, and that just doesn't happen enough. Las Marias: Being a contract manufacturer, Jason, do you talk to designers to make sure that whatever design they throw out to you guys is manufacturable? That there's no need for a radical change in your assembly set up to be able to adapt to whatever design is thrown out at you? Keeping: I think I really just compliment the way Bob said it, but if I go back to best practices and you start looking at DFM, most of the time when conformal coat- ing or other rugged- ization are thought out, it's not because they've thought of it in advance but because they've had a field failure, a test did not pass, or they just want to make some- thing better. Then they look at confor- mal coating or ruggedization. At this point, we're doing the DFM for ruggedization, but how do we get the new capabilities to work with current products and designs? What I mean is, a lot of the times as we're looking at the products the customer wants to understand how to get it to the field better, but do they know when they're at a design stage what's going to be that final end environment? What does the product need to work in? What are the convections that might inhibit this function or cause failure? What ruggedization is required? Do you need to do assembly cleaning? Do you need to do coating or plotting? How do you select all the right components? As we switch from tin lead to lead free, there's a lot of components that are designed different. You try to do this capa - bility, and it actually will affect their functions and working capabilities. Then as you design a board with those proper components and that right process in mind, that would give you that additional longer life and higher reliability. A lot of the times when a customer first looks at a product they're looking at just the cost alone but usually not the total cost of ownership, how to get all of those capabilities done at the design stages before it gets to the EMS provider. Andy Shaughnessy: A lot of designers say that they're designing with the fabricator and assembly facilities' capabilities in mind, but they're swamped and behind schedule, so they do make mistakes. Form what I've heard from fabricators, most design errors tend to be mechanical, not electrical, like putting some- thing too close to an edge.