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JANUARY 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 15 to achieve the desired end result. Smart real- ly is—instead of the hands—the intelligence of the workforce. Brassard: One great thing about highly motivat- ed and ingenious human minds is they can piv- ot very quickly to solve problems or take on new challenges. The code and scrips that com- prise the basis of automation, however, are in- herently non-intelligent, no matter how much forethought a programmer tries to build in at the onset of the systems architecture. Circuit board manufacturers make significant invest- ments in their pre-production automations, us- ing complex design for manufacture (DFM) software tools to reduce errors and speed up the pre-manufacturing process. As the level of tech- nology manufactured in the United States con- tinues to advance more rapidly, these automa- tions quickly become inadequate or obsolete. If the market demands agility and flexibility from its manufacturers, if your company needs to pivot and take a hard right turn, your stand- ing automations may not turn so readily. Sim- ple automations can be quickly reprogrammed, but complex automations take time to change. Audra Thurston: We have parts right now that we have been working on with the team where there are necessary manual processes required to ensure form, fit and function—complete- ly specialized. I don't think entirely automat- ed equipment works for very high technology boards and special processes that are unique to certain designs. You must be able to flex and have the human brain power to figure out how you're going to do these specialized processes for these advanced designs. Johnson: We've got a couple of different ideas. One of them is that the ability to flex or piv- ot with the technology that comes out of hu- man knowledge—engineering knowledge— more than the equipment. At the same time, while you can invest a lot of time and money in automating processes, and bringing robotics into the factory, there's still opportunity to look at human factors: what you do with the work- flow, and what you do with the actual labor be- ing done on the manufacturing floor, to still op- timize that and find ways to make that smarter. If you can remove one iteration in a step, in a work order, a small change that then builds up over time with efficiencies and capacity, there may be hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars invested in changing your workflow with equipment. To change your processes of- ten is a very small investment, the benefits of which drop to your profitability. Brassard: I agree. I've had the privilege to wit- ness our company go from somewhat lagging in capability decades back to being closer to the forefront of product realization. There are no "aha!" moments. You just don't feel or in- ternalize the progress because you're always working on the next thing. But in those ret- rospective moments, you recognize it usually comes down to motivated people in all roles and at all levels doing their best to move the organization forward. Automation is cool and modern manufacturing equipment is often a game changer, but even the most modern equipment provides little value without great people making the most of it, whether pro- gramming or simply operating. Perhaps a middle ground between overly automated smart factories and traditional process improvement is smart processes, although I believe a better term is "dynamic pro- cesses." As designs become more complex and tolerance requirements stack up, the need to fine- tune process parameters on a step-by-step basis becomes critical. Dynamic processes is where product is evaluated in each step of a process and subsequent steps are fine-tuned to maintain as much of an open tolerance as possible for subsequent steps. This combats the challenges that come with stacking tolerance requirements. For example, several OEMs are allowing addi- tional layers of substrate to be added in the mid- production route to tune final thickness. The stackup is not fixed, but dynamic. LaBeau: Where does innovation come from? A robot isn't innovation. As we look at the U.S. business climate today—the NDAA, on- shoring, COVID, and what/where your sup-