Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1369942
58 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2021 philosophies and our own individual processes for achieving design success. We were occa- sionally notified by email when our assembly counterparts had to stop the line and reset for another job due to a problem with one of our designs: • "Missing fiducial marks on the bottom side" • "e parts are placed too close together" • "e panel is warping aer first-pass reflow" • "e stencil opening is too large" • "e pizza cutter isn't working with this V-score" Of course, upper management was copied on these internal cries for help. However, once the problems were worked through, the PCB assemblies usually performed well. e elec- tronics engineering manager was happy and design engineering quickly forgot about the desperate cries from our assembly group. One day, our disregard for DFM review came to an end. Our PCB layout group was suddenly placed under the leadership of the manager of engineering services, a gentleman named Mark who, not coincidentally, also managed the PCB assembly group. Suddenly, the excla- mation point-laden frustration notifications from our assembly group stopped. I'm ashamed to admit it now, but our PCB design group actually thought that our new engineering services manager had set the PCB assembly group straight on their role in the PCB development process. We believed that our philosophy was working. Had Mark really retrained the PCB assem- bly group to adapt to a new manufacturing for design (MFD) philosophy? Au contraire! As it turned out, his wisdom was to have a profound effect on my design career. During the time that the PCB assembly group had seemingly gone dark, our engineer- ing services manager had been coaching them to collect data on our designs. When problems arose, a simple spreadsheet was used to record the date, the class of problem, and the amount of downtime it caused before it could be fixed. Aer several months, Mark scheduled a meeting between the PCB design group and the PCB assembly group to discuss the data that the assembly team had collected. Aer hearing from the PCB assembly group, it soon was clear that reoccurring DFM issues were overly present on far too many of our designs. e minor DFM issues were stopping our assembly lines. DFM workarounds were add- ing up to hundreds of hours of lost time. No less than 23 separate issues were found over this measurement period. It would have been easy for the assembly group to point fingers at us, but they did not. Mark had been coaching them with the book e 4 Disciplines of Execution, written by Chris McChesney and Sean Covey. During this time, the assembly team had adopted a "wildly important goal" of improving PCB assembly line performance by identifying and solving problems. ey had gotten busy, using the book's four disciplines: 1. ey focused on the wildly important. 2. ey acted upon lead measures. 3. ey kept a compelling scoreboard. 4. ey kept a cadence of accountability. In our meeting, the PCB assembly group gave a stunning presentation of how the pro- gram worked. ey were able to gather and present compelling data which had an impact. Next, our savvy manager invited us to partici- pate in the program. We all received copies of e Four Disciplines of Execution. We chose a wildly important goal of reducing DFM defects affecting our assembly stakeholders by 90% within six months. Figure 1: The 4 Disciplines of Execution, written by Chris McChesney and Sean Covey, provided us a framework to move forward with a solid DFM process.