Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1339822
28 PCB007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2021 on Factory of the Future because, strategi- cally for IPC, it is the framework that defines our overall roadmap moving forward. It has been designed to drive the industry forward, to modernize, and to help build electronics better. Everything that we're doing now with- in IPC is wrapped around this concept of ad- vancing the industry. We're structuring our program to foster in- dustry-wide awareness, collaboration, and implementation. What better way to do this than at an industry conference like IPC APEX EXPO? We're building upon 20+ years of ma- ture conventional technologies and now we're adding in a very strong focus on emerging and disruptive technologies; IPC's Factory of the Future vision and mission. Johnson: Be a bit of a futurist for me for a mo- ment. What do you want Factory of the Fu- ture to look like in 2022 and beyond? What's out there in the planning stages for our shared readers and participants? Kelly: If I'm peering into my crystal ball, and Chris has heard me talk about this for a long time now, it is really all about implementa- tion. e concepts, the ideas, the promise of these technologies and ways of working, they've been out there for quite some time but what's different is we're at the cusp of a lot of these maturing to a point where we can actually use them to deliver real business val- ue. Looking past this year, 2021, and into 2022 and '23, what I would like to see is more actu- al implementation across IPC's membership and across the electronics industry, so that in 2022, we have even more companies report- ing back, "ese are the types of problems that were out there in my factory and my sup- ply chain and here's how I was able to solve them using this new way of working." If you think about what has been done for the last 20 years, there's been so much con- tent published on solder joint metallurgy, in- terconnect failure mechanisms, electronic as- sembly materials, and SMT assembly process- es—all of these studies using different tech- niques (like design of experiments, statistical analysis, and gap analysis, for example) to solve problems and make improvements. I'd like to see the industry take those concepts and methods and apply them now to modern business needs and applications like electri- cal-mechanical co-design, real-time statisti- cal process control, supply chain data mining and insights, high-mix low-volume optimiza- tion, NPI cycle time reduction, six sigma qual- ity delivery, high product mix yield improve- ments, all of these types of things. at's what I hope for in the next couple of years: more implementation and more case study exam- ples of all of this technology and new ways of work at play. Johnson: I get to talk to a lot of people in the industry, and I run into the occasional cynic who will say that all of this is just about con- vincing industry participants to buy new equipment. But if someone really listens to what we're talking about here today, that's not the case at all. Kelly: No. I'm an engineer; first and foremost, we go back to basics. ese things have to create value. In engineering and in the production