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30 SMT Magazine • August 2017 you paid for it, or is it a lot more based on the 1s and 0s you have added to the hard drive or the cloud? What value do you declare for your com- puter when going through customs? Will the issue of the price we pay for elec- tronic components become moot and evapo- rate when we are able to create components or assembled products by simply printing them in our office? Will the human machine inter- face (HMI) for the pick-and-place machine be- come considerably less expensive when we will be able to directly program and control the ma- chine with our brain? Will we even need a pick- and-place machine to assemble an electronic product? Hey, what do YOU say? I'd like to hear your thoughts, reactions and opinions. We'll wrap up our discussion on materi- al pricing next month with input from people close to the uncontrollable material cost vari- ables we have discussed in this column. SMT References 1. T. Borkes, "Electronic Product Assembly in the Global Marketplace: The Material Piece of the Competitive Puzzle," SMTA Internation- al Conference Proceedings, Orlando, Fl., Octo- ber 2010. 2. T. Borkes, "Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking and Analyzing the Cost of Material in Today's Global Economy, Part 1," SMT Maga- zine, June 2017. 3. T. Borkes, "Analyzing the Cost of Material in Today's Global Economy, Part 2," SMT Maga- zine, July 2017. 4. T. Borkes, "Electronic Product Assembly in the Global Marketplace: The Material Piece of the Competitive Puzzle," SMTA Internation- al Conference Proceedings, Orlando, Fl., Octo- ber 2010. 5. N. Negroponte, Being Digital, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Tom Borkes is the founder of the Jefferson Project and the forthcom- ing Jefferson Institute of Technolo- gy. To read past columns or to con- tact Borkes, click here. ANALYZING THE COST OF MATERIAL IN TODAY'S GLOBAL ECONOMY, PART 3 I-Connect007 Survey on Process Step Elimination: Percentage of Total Cycle Time Spent on Final Inspection Around half of the respondents answered they only spend gen- erally between 1% and 5% of their total cycle time doing final inspection of their products. On the other hand, about 30% of the respondents said almost up to 15% of their total cycle time is spent doing inspection, while 10% of the surveyed manufacturers even said they spend even longer time than that when it comes to final inspection.