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20 The PCB Magazine • September 2017 Even if your company has an expensive statis- tics package, duplicate the experiment's results on your own system because your next employ- er may not have it. Or if you start your own business, this will be your basis of solving prob- lems and working on things. Automating and Automation Before you spend big money for automa- tion, it's nice if you had a plan and knew exactly what automation meant. And it's not just neces- sarily buying equipment. It may also be stream- lining the information or the accountability for the customers or traceability or something like that. Then we also have a chapter on auto- matic chemical control in a new mini e-book (not yet published), which you could imple- ment yourself that's low cost or built by main- tenance men. Because as things become more automated and happen faster, and you take the people out of it, you can use fewer chemicals. If you can automatically analyze and dose, your PCB PROCESS ENGINEERING: DETAILS FROM ONE OF THE ORIGINALS chemical inventory goes down and the swings in the bath go down. Figure 4 illustrates a very inexpensive but very sensitive specific gravi- ty sensor that you can build for practically any aqueous process. One of my hobbies is simple methods of au- tomatic chemical control to go with the high- er mechanization and the speed of throughput. Automation planning is just one along with the 25 essential skills that a process engineer needs to learn over their entire career. These are need- ed to get the bonuses, make the customers hap- py, make the boss happy, or get the important promotion. These are items that have taken me and my friends a long time to distill down into 25 topics. I'm not saying there aren't more than that; it's just the ones that have come to the top of my mind It will include long distance learning, in terms of how they can actually gain these skills if there's nobody around that hap- pens to teach them, and make them available. PCB Design: Where the PE's Headaches Begin Thinking back, one of the biggest headaches for a process engineer is something that they can't control, and that's the design of the product. Many times, the design of the product makes the process engineer's job rather diffi- cult because it's somewhat unpredict- able. What you have got to do as the process engineer is to go back and fig- ure out how to improve the latitude of the processes because you can't afford to put another chemical into it. That's the wrong way to react to that type of crisis, by making things more compli- cated. I still think that PC board design- ers feel their customer is the people paying the bill to have the board de- signed. But in a Six Sigma TQC, your customer is the next process step. So, the customer of the designer is the fab- ricator, the customer of the fabricator is the assembler and on down the line. Look at it that way. I was in manufacturing, and as we improved quality and built quality Figure 4: This specific gravity sensor is built from a simple plastic level switch where a threaded, drilled-out plastic rod and threaded nut have been attached.