Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1449048
42 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2022 like to tell in our IPC CID classes is that our system is kind of jacked up because milestone 10 is oen put out as milestone one. It really starts with our industrial design team. e industrial designers get out their big board with pastels and they work with the cus- tomer to dream up this great looking product from the outside. It keeps getting smaller and smaller and ergonomically friendly, and sud- denly, it fits in the palm of a hand or on a wrist. en, they hand that over to the mechanical folks, who take all that information; that's mile- stone nine, and they put it into a nice mechani- cal package. At the end of the process, one of the last milestones is to then hand it over to the elec- tronics team, which is tasked with finding com- ponents and all the technologies to shrink this thing down into the package. at's where they must back-pedal. If they cannot find the parts that are available, or the components are tak- ing up too much room and won't fit, they must go back and forth, like the project team missed a turn somewhere because they weren't riding the same bus. Matties: In each of those milestones that you're describing, each one of those functions may have their own set of milestones. Dack: at's true. Matties: Kelly, we all know about DFM, but is there a new acronym called DWM, design with manufacturing? Dack: Yes, DWM is floating around. We could also say DWX, design with excellence, so that it applies to assembly, test, etc. Andy Shaughnessy: Kelly and Bob, is every pro- cess step necessarily a milestone? A lot of flow charts for PCB design showed milestones and process steps, and they used the words inter- changeably. Or are milestones primarily criti- cal points in the process? Dack: I think you must look at every process step. We use a program here called monday. com, a communication app that organizes multi-stakeholder or team ideas, infographic displays and charts. Tise: Yes, we use that. Dack: What it does is let other stakeholders know how far along in the process one is toward meeting a specific milestone. Milestones equal success, I would think, in a project. You must have a measurable milestone. How far along in a measurement are you toward meeting that goal? Tise: Right. Some of the milestones took place before I'd even start the design. A lot of times, I got the schematic on a scanned copy, and I had to input the schematic with all the parts and such. When I got that complete, I would send that out to have it reviewed by the customer, make sure that I connected all his dots the way he wanted them connected. en, that would be a milestone. He'd sign off on that. Kelly Dack