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Happy’s Tech Talk #49: Stop! Do You Have a Digital Strategy for the Future?

I am sure you have been wondering how you will survive this new age of AI, tariffs, China, and the ever-increasing cost of materials and PCB equipment. You cannot just sit back and watch it roll over you. If you wish for your company to survive, you need a “digitization strategy,” and that includes a way to afford it.

After working in the industry for 50 years, I believe profits will not magically expand to a level that can be maintained for much longer. You need a strategy that will enable you to compete in this industry and expand your capabilities to attract new customers. Some of the challenges you face:

• Scarcity of suitable new employees with skills
• Maximum first-pass yields on ever-increasing complex multilayers
• Difficulty getting technical support for complex problems
• Providing short lead times and DFM knowledge to customers
• Increasing material, labor, utilities, and operating costs
• Fending off the growing presence of large Asian PCB fab competition

Driven by integrated circuits and software, electronic devices are increasingly complex in density, size, and layer count.

How do you compete in this arena? You automate. But automation is complicated and expensive, so how do you handle this challenge?

The Nature of the Problem
One way is to find out how others are meeting this challenge. I read an interesting article1 by Jim Zahora, CEO of The Abilities Connection (TAC), a Springfield, Ohio-based manufacturer and longtime supplier of cargo nets to the U.S. Air Force. His company needed to be more cost-competitive to secure future orders from the Air Force. But he faced these obstacles:

• TAC had diversified its workforce to include people with disabilities (to gain a larger population of workers), and training was increasing costs and slowing the implementation of newer technologies
• Attempts to reshore TAC’s materials and equipment suppliers from Asia were not happening, and tariffs were not inducing the Asians to move manufacturing here

TAC tried a different tack: Invest in automation, diversification, and vertical integration. Today, 100% of TAC’s product is manufactured in the U.S.: lead times are shorter, throughput has increased, and the workforce is performing more complex tasks with machine help.

The Working Solution
Your approach to automation doesn’t always need to mean buying expensive equipment; you can work with the resources you already have.

You have experts on PCBs and their materials, processes, and tooling. In maintenance, you have experts on your equipment and how to keep it running. So, the first task is to identify individuals who want to learn about automation planning and can implement automation solutions, and then start planning the implementation of digitization and automation.  If you want it done, you have to do it yourself.

For the rest of the year, my columns will discuss various techniques, devices, solutions, and equipment that you can fabricate (even locally) to solve your automation and other needs.

The Initial Steps
If you have decided that your company needs this strategy to survive, the first task is to create a team dedicated to accomplishing these goals. Though I believe recruiting a new college engineering graduate is an important part of developing your team, training a new graduate could cost up to $20,000. You already have employees who have been trained and established, especially in CAM-tooling and maintenance. These are ideal candidates who can be upskilled for your task. They have the hands-on skills, combined with grit and curiosity, giving them an advantage over an engineer with credentials.

Once the team is established, look for partners, resources, and further education opportunities. Resources are machine shops and mechanical fabricators that can build the devices that we will talk about in the next few columns. Partner with community colleges or technical high schools that train youth for our industries. This allows you to build a pipeline for talent. It may require some of your time volunteering in an after-school club, but it could evolve into a self-reinforcing partnership. Education should start with the basics of automation planning and sensor technology.

The Capstone Project for Interns
An alternative is to recruit engineering students for the summer, as many are seeking experience and a way to earn money during the school break. With interns, you can assign a simple project they already understand and have them execute it. One idea is a good manufacturing practices (GMP) project in which they document everything from the user requirements specification (URS) to the functional requirements specification (FRS) to the system design specification (SDS). They can handle PLC and SCADA code implementation, as well as commissioning and acceptance testing.

Along the way, the activities might increase the likelihood that, after graduation, they will consider returning to work for you. These activities include building a schedule, estimating durations, and comparing and reporting on estimates vs. reality. With this approach, the intern has received training and a healthy dose of context for future projects in about two weeks, having touched on documentation, coding, testing, and project management.

There are a lot of sharp, motivated people out there who can do this work, but I admit that finding them is hard.

Apprenticeship Over Time
Apprenticeships are also a popular activity, and one that can create the “automation engineer” you have been longing for. It also provides soft skills for approaching difficult issues, learning new processes, and understanding when it is appropriate to ask for help under the real constraints, timelines, and consequences inherent in automating machinery.

Conclusion
The Automation Strategy (of Digitization) will follow the process seen in Figure 1. After training the team, a thorough automation assessment will be performed to discover opportunities, followed by the design and delivery phases.

This follows what Jim Zahora found useful. He concluded:

“For manufacturing leaders looking at something similar, let me offer a few final thoughts: Resources exist. We leaned on our Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which is part of NIST, for research and evaluation. That was especially helpful because we do not carry engineers on staff who specialize in every piece of automation equipment. Industry associations helped, too. You do not have to take the leap without a guide.

“Change does not happen overnight, and big changes in the defense supply chain sometimes do not move at commercial speed. But the payoff on the other side—a multi-year long-term contract, a more resilient supply chain, and production capacity we can flex with demand—is why we kept at it.

“One thing our operations team often says enough that it is worth repeating: ‘If you are still doing things the way you did them 20 years ago, you are in trouble and do not know it. Someone else will automate. Someone else will cut the lead time. Someone else will match the quality. Sooner than you think, it will be too late to catch up.’ I'd rather take the leap.”

References

1. “We Need Automation to Reshore Our Supply Chains,” by Jim Zahora, Industry Week, June 1, 2026.

Happy Holden has worked in printed circuit technology since 1970 with Hewlett-Packard, NanYa Westwood, Merix, Foxconn, and Gentex. He is currently a contributing technical editor with I-Connect007, and the author of Automation and Advanced Procedures in PCB Fabrication, and 24 Essential Skills for Engineers. 

This column originally appeared in the July 2026 issue of I-Connect007 Magazine.