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September 2017 • The PCB Design Magazine 15 PREDICTIVE ENGINEERING: HAPPY HOLDEN DISCUSSES TRUE DFM We can teach them to do something in a short amount of time. Whereas with a robot, we have to program it and fixture it and turn it upside down and left and right, etc. It's not that easy to take the human out of the assembly equation. This is what Hitachi really pioneered, which is why the Japanese products, when they're first invented, stay in Japan for the first three to five years, being built in automated facilities. When everybody's copied them and they start getting price erosion, they start to ship it offshore, pref- erably to the Philippines or to Vietnam, where they can control the IP. It's not until the prod- uct is at least 10 years old that they ever let it into China, because, as they told me, once it goes into China you'll lose all the IP. In the Phil- ippines and Vietnam, you can control that IP. It doesn't leave Japan until the second generation is beginning to be released. One way they enforce design for manufac- turing is that if you don't need the fully auto- They sat around and knitted and painted walls and things like that until Apple started ordering again. Then they all went back to work. One of the highest priorities I was given, with an un- limited budget, was to automate out these girls, so that when Apple stopped ordering we'd just turn the switch off. I told them the bad news was, "Well, maybe in 10 years." It was difficult to explain to them it wasn't a matter of money, because they thought auto- mation meant just buying robots, putting them on the line, and displacing people. I said no, first you have to have an automation strategy. Then we have to have fixturing and end effec- tors. Then we have to go back to the original designers and teach them about automation and simplification. We have to work together to simplify this thing because you may not like these girls sitting there knitting and everything, but when it comes to assembly time, they've got these 10 digits on two hands that can ma- nipulate things. Figure 2: Process flow for the design planning of a printed circuit.