Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1355791
28 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2021 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE Goldman: at's quite an honor, as you know, and very impressive. What were your thoughts when you first got the phone call? Ford: Disbelief ! It was quite a surprise. We have been busy this last year, there have been a lot of achievements in the various task groups that I work with but, compared with the whole range of work that is done within IPC teams every year, I feel just a very small part of what everyone contributes overall. Goldman: I understand. Tell us about yourself and your involvement with IPC, which I'm sure was and is extensive. Ford: I've been working in the industry since the 1980s. I started developing soware long before it was recognizable in manufacturing and am basically self-taught in terms of finding solutions for things in the digital domain. at's always been my interest, and I'm fortunate to have had some excellent opportunities and encouragement to create innovation through- out my various roles in the industry. at is what drove my career toward Aegis, with their modern progressive approach. Aegis genuinely wants to create solutions and technologies that help the industry, embracing leadership through example, which fits very well with my personal goals. I've been working as a part of IPC com- mittees now for about six or seven years. I started out with the traceability standard, IPC- 1782, which the group completed within record time, and then things have gone from strength to strength. It was a gradual introduction and has developed into a great environment for me to b e able to share my thoughts and ideas. Goldman: Very good. What is your current involvement? What kind of committees are you involved with? I know you're with the Connected Factory Exchange. Ford: Yes, the busiest committee at the moment is CFX, the Connected Factory Exchange. For me, this standard is very significant for the industry. All the way through my career, the bottleneck in creating value with computing has always been the limitation in exchanging data with good communication with machines. Extracting data sounds a simple thing to do in principle, but it is not when every machine has a different mechanism for extracting data and has a different language. e first time that we had a CFX meeting, with all the machine ven- dors together in one room, I was wondering whether we'd be able to get through the meet- ing without calling security, because of course historically, the industry is very competitive. I was pleasantly surprised when I looked prop- erly around the room and saw that everybody was looking very positive, it was as if some- thing had fundamentally changed. I guess it was the knowledge of IPC's principles that provided the unique setting. It was realized that competing over data was preventing both customers and vendors from achieving value, and therefore not the best way to go forward. at represents my inspiration with IPC because there is no other organization that could achieve that. As I started working seri- ously with the CFX committee, chaired by Aegis, we continued to help conceive and realize the standard we see today. It's been an amazing situation having so many people from many companies all willing to contrib- ute. ere are literally hundreds of committee members, mainly from machine vendor com- panies, pretty much whom at some point or another have been talking to me about their aspirations with CFX. I somehow volunteered to be in the center of the process of gathering ideas, information, and requirements from all the different committee members—a very interesting position to be in. Putting every- thing together to create the CFX standard document, I was fully expecting people were going to have different opinions, as I am not the expert in every machine technology there is. With every addition that I made, I was expecting pushback, but miraculously, every-