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August 2017 • SMT Magazine 19 TRAINING AND EDUCATION: KEY TO IMPROVING ELECTRONICS ASSEMBLY figure out how to do it and how to do it well," says Ramirez. Ellis agrees, saying that a lot of customers just don't know how to design for manufacturability. "We often have to guide them so that their designs are consistent with their capabilities and available re- sources. For example, a customer may have a BOM with 175 differ- ent part numbers, which would necessitate multiple pick-and- place machines, when they really don't have the budget for that. We can often assist them in designing their product in a way that meets the capability of equipment they can afford," he says. Beck adds that many of their customers, especially the larger companies, will invest in their own prototyping equipment to be able to work out a lot of these issues in advance, be- fore turning a product over to an assembler, who would produce the boards on a much larg- er scale when necessary. Training and Education is Key Overall, one of the key factors that these ex- perts point to when it comes to improving the PCB assembly process is training and better ed- ucation, as most of the people in the line just don't have any formal training in electronics as- sembly methods. "I think one very important area is better ed- ucation, to be honest," says Beck. "If you're an OEM, you have a lot of different processes that you're trying to integrate to build a finished product. Electronic assembly is only one aspect of that. We find with a lot of our small- and me- dium-volume customers that they'll have peo- ple who are performing a wide variety of job functions. Many of them, for whatever reason, just don't have any formal training in electron- ic assembly methods and best practices. "When we do installs, we very often find that there's quite a bit of hand-holding required because a lot of the operators simply lack ex- perience and training. Many don't take advan- tage of the industry resources that are out there and really educate themselves. Not all of them; some certainly do. Some get semi-annual training and have experts come in and conduct re- views and training classes and the whole bit, but a lot of them don't. I think better overall education is extremely important." MC Assembly, for their part, does a lot of internal training, ac- cording to Prina, especially when it comes to continuous improve- ment. "Things like the IPC's and the soldering classes; but I think to echo what we're talking about, as far as education, we do a ton of benchmarking. I think you need to get out of your own skin and live in a lit- tle bigger world. You go see some of these other plants. I've been here since 1994. If this is where I lived and I never got out of our plant, I would see things that would be considered to be com- mon place, this is the way people do things, and you don't realize that there are better methods and better ideas out there," he explains. "It's not about stealing, because you have to go back and you have to adapt it to what works for you. I was at Toyota recently, again, just benchmark- ing to see their ideas on assembly. MC Assembly is never going to be Toyota. We're never going to buy billions of dollars' worth of tooling; but again, there are a lot of small things that we can take away from that and learn. We belong to AME (Association of Manufacturing Excellence) and 'share, learn, grow' is their mantra. Just get- ting out and seeing how other people are doing things and then adapting them to what works best for your process is fantastic." Prina says that in addition to benchmarking, they also send large groups of people for things like Excel training. "People knew how to load an Excel worksheet and do some basic manip- ulations, but they didn't realize or even know what a macro was. We can save them hours on simple things like data entry just by doing that kind of training. We spend a lot of time and we encourage the supervisors to go out and search for things from which people would benefit and who should go." Teaching people to think differently often results in new ideas and improved process— Luis Ramirez