Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527276
portions of the AG electron- ics business. I started my career in this area as a process/quality engineer as a liaison between my company and EMS providers. We'd get a product stable and move it to the EMS provider. We still owned the design and con- trolled everything in the BOM, the AML. We all know the electronics industry goes through alloca- tions every three to four years. When that hap- pened, we looked for parts. We went to the broker market if we couldn't get them through normal chains. I remember some of the first brokered parts we bought in the mid-2000s. Aer the 2008 eco- nomic meltdown, everybody in the electronics industry had slashed their capacity. For the ag industry, it was a blip. In the space of a year, we went from building at 100% capacity to cut- ting production to going all out and needing to increase equipment capacity. When every- body in the electronics component industry had cut capacity, we had to go to the broker market to find components. However, we also realized the inherent danger in this approach, so we knew we had to be careful of what we purchased. When we purchased components from the secondary (broker) market, we started implementing checks to verify authenticity. I remember clearly some of the first counter- feits. As soon as they came in, we suspected something was wrong. e labels were poorly printed on the reels, the silk screening on the physical parts wasn't spelled correctly, and you could rub the labeling off the part. I remember us throwing some samples in the X-ray, only to find there was nothing inside. We saw a lot of crude stuff. If you had an X-ray and a cotton swab with acetone, you could tell if you had a counterfeit. Fast forward to the next market allocation in the 2013–14 timeframe and we found that 18 SMT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2024 counterfeiters had advanced their game significantly. In one instance we suspected a receipt of components but couldn't prove their authenticity. Err- ing on the side of caution we scrapped a six-figure dollar value of parts that we had bought. is drove us to do some sig- nificant lessons-learned activi- ties. We wrote up instructions on what to look for so we didn't experience the same costly issue. One of the activities included expanding the charter of the component engineering groups to sup- port component authentication. In addition, the company's advanced analysis laboratory expanded its capabilities to be able to evalu- ate parts. e work instructions we developed instructed our buyers to reach out to the tech- nical teams in these two groups to evaluate bro- kered components before use in production. With these instructions in place, we were quite confident that we'd be covered if anything was brought in outside normal supply channels. Regarding the huge market allocations in the 2017-18 timeframe, these processes were not nearly as robust as needed. As many peo- ple familiar with the industry likely remem- ber, the 2017-18 allocation differed from oth- ers in that it wasn't just one or a few impacted component types. Rather, every component type was impacted. From the simplest pas- sive device to the most complex processor, everything in between. At the same time, the ag industry was at the top of its demand cycle. No one could build enough equipment to meet demand. Shutting down a multi-million-dol- lar-a-day vehicle factory for want of an elec- tronic controller was not acceptable. at allocation went on for so long that, in the postmortem, we found out our buyers had become tired. It got to the point where they'd ask a distributor or component manu- facturer, "Will we get these parts on this day?" If they said no, the buyer bought from a bro- Paul Jarske