Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
14 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2021 Johnson: You mentioned there is standards work underway at the IPC. Ford: Yes. e IPC-2552 MDB (model-based design) standard is due for release by the end of this year, or so. It's made in conjunction with team members in China. ey have defined so much component material information in standard form, including a 3D representation, much more than you would get from the data sheet. Material data will potentially be deliv- ered in a standard digital form fairly soon. ere are so many benefits from the applica- tion perspective of this standard, we hope that industry associations and players will adopt this. ere is only the need to include a small piece of soware within each solution in which components are designed to create the IPC- 2552 format, in a similar way as IPC-2581 does for PCB design. So is that really a barrier? It needs these kinds of innovations to be under- stood to understand what is created by the stan- dard in terms of opportunity, and then apply it. Matties: For the people still using Excel and email—and apparently that's prevalent—how do they make that transition? What's the in- vestment into a BOM tool and what are the benefits of using a tool dedicated for BOMs? Ford: Using email and Excel sounds relatively simple, but it's not, and such practices are not secure either. Many original BOM reports still come out of ERP in the form that used to be sent to a printer. ere are a lot of formatting changes that are needed, representing a lot of ways in which mistakes can be made, as the data needs to be manually manipulated. Hav- ing a solution with the intelligence to automat- ically translate these different formats and be able to then check consistency between the design intent, the original BOM that went to ERP, the BOM that came back from ERP, as well as the modified AVL, eliminates a huge amount of risk. Do all these things match up? Are there any reference designators in the de- sign BOM that suddenly are not populated in the final production BOM? Yes, you can process all of this manually, but even with Excel, you're liable to make mistakes and it would take many hours to do it proper- ly with a lot of checking, whereas with a pro- fessional BOM merging tool within the pro- duction engineering system, you almost don't need to think about it anymore. e soware will simply tell you if there is an unresolvable mismatch for any reason. Engineers can focus on adding real value. I would say that automat- ing this whole process is vitally important, be- cause if you make a mistake here, the product would basically be scrap. Matties: ere are a lot of subsets to the BOM, as you mentioned. How does a company man- age all the subsets? Ford: Today, with difficulty, I would say. e main thing is to make sure that the final BOM