Standard of Excellence

November 26, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Hiring for Quality Positions in Manufacturing, Engineering, and Management

In continuing my series on finding, signing, and keeping good people for your company, this month we discuss hiring good people for your quality department. Even when hiring was easier, hiring for the quality department has always been especially challenging. It takes a special kind of person: someone with attention to detail, someone ready to stand for his or her convictions, and someone who can stand up under pressure when the company needs to ship product and the quality manager refuses to because it is not up to par. The quality department is the very soul of any manufacturing company.

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October 23, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Finding and Hiring the Right Candidates for Engineering Positions

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge we face today is finding, hiring and keeping the right people. With this in mind, I will be dedicating my next three columns to finding and nurturing the right individuals for engineering, quality and manufacturing. This month, we begin with how to hire and keep the right people so they become productive engineers.

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September 10, 2024

Standard of Excellence: The Advantages of Working With Small PCB Businesses

For several large companies, especially those in the mil-aero industries, there are distinct and critical advantages to buying from officially designated small businesses. The official definition of a small business is one with fewer than 750 employees. For unclear reasons, some companies have been less focused on these advantages than they used to be, so I thought it would be helpful to remind people of the advantages of working with these small businesses.

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August 19, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Customer Service Beyond Performance

It is no longer enough to simply deliver good quality products on time, especially in today’s competitive marketplace where attracting and retaining customers is challenging. We spend a lot of time, money, and energy finding and winning over new customers and we sometimes forget how important it is to make sure we don’t lose them. Unfortunately, that is often exactly what happens.

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July 15, 2024

Standard of Excellence: It Starts With Company Culture

We spend a great deal of time on our equipment, processes, qualifications, and specifications, and we do a pretty good job at what we do. But we often miss the boat when talking about company culture—what could be the most important aspect of a great company. With the right company culture, we can accomplish anything. In fact, the level at which we run our equipment, processes, and so forth rests significantly on our company culture.

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June 19, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Looking Five Years Into the Future

The future of the PCB industry will be based on technology. As components get smaller, denser, and more complicated, PCB fabrication companies must keep up with their customers’ needs both today and in the future. It is no longer enough to just keep up with our customers’ current needs. We must be prepared to meet their PCB needs three to five years out. We need a complete understanding of where our customers are going and what they will need in the near distant future.

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May 15, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Collaboration—The Right Path to Innovation

Now more than ever, as new and innovative technologies for printed circuit boards are in demand, we need collaboration between PCB designers, fabricators, and assemblers. Close partnerships with PCB designers and assemblers are key to developing and producing PCBs with boards with new and innovative technology. These collaborative partnerships, along with the partnership with the end customers, are more critical than ever before.

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March 20, 2024

Standard Of Excellence: Delivering Superior Customer Service

I believe that creating the best possible customer experience is an opportunity many of us have been missing or overlooking for the past few years. We have been so busy focusing on technology, quality, innovation, and manufacturing processes (and for a good reason) that we may have neglected the way we treat our customers. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we treat them poorly, but we don’t treat them well enough.

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February 21, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Moving Into the Future by Growing Your Technology

It’s a well-known fact that if your company is not growing and moving forward every single day, it is dying. The same rule applies to technology companies: To stay alive, you must grow your technology by keeping up with your customers’ product technology needs. Too many printed circuit board fabricators are dying a slow death because they are not willing or able to invest the time, energy, money, and passion to always work on their technology.

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January 17, 2024

Standard of Excellence: Selling to PCB Fabricators Now and in the Future

For the past few years, PCB fabricators have made improvements to keep up with your customers. We have bought new equipment, updated our processes, and increased our quality, technology, and performance to make sure we are providing our customers with everything they need to be successful. I thought this would be a good time to discuss and advise our vendors and suppliers on what they should do to supply us with what we need to succeed.

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December 20, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Innovation—The Path to Success

Innovation is the name of the game these days. As our customers develop and produce more cutting-edge products, they expect their PCB suppliers to not only keep up with their needs but be ready to meet them in the future. Those of us who are serious about the future of our companies and want to remain at the cutting edge of the technology curve must be the leaders of innovation.

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November 29, 2023

Standard of Excellence: The Perfect PCB Fab—A Vision for Five Years Ahead

To sustain a standard of excellence, it’s equally important to look at both what we’re doing today as well as what we’ll do in the future. In other words, plan ahead. In that spirit, I thought it would be prudent to peek into the future and talk about what a printed circuit board fabrication facility with a “standard of excellence” will look like five years from now.

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October 24, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Keep Learning or Start Dying

“Keep learning or start dying” is an old but morbid (to say the least) phrase that’s perfectly suited to our own PCB industry. I would tweak it just a bit and say that if you’re not increasing your technology level and expanding your technology roadmap, your company will start to die. Based on my research, I’ve come up with 18 reasons why every PCB company should be investing its time, effort, and funding into bringing its technology level to not only the cutting-edge, but the bleeding edge.

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September 19, 2023

Standard Of Excellence: The Products of the Future

In my last column, I discussed cutting-edge innovations in printed circuit board technology, focusing on innovative trends in ultra HDI, embedded passives and components, green PCBs, and advanced substrate materials. This month, I’m following up with the products these new PCB technologies are destined for. Why do we need all these new technologies?

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August 29, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Advancing PCBs—The Total Solution

One of the most important elements of running a business is being able to look forward. A true company leader must be able to define the future as best she or he can and then adapt their own strategies to meet the demands of that future. It’s been said that if you don’t define your future, someone else will do it for you. This month I want to look at some of the changes, or should I say improvements, that are occurring in our own industry. Some of them are new but others have been around for years. Either way, their time has come.

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July 21, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Today’s Hottest Technology Trends

No matter what anyone says, printed circuit boards are the backbone of modern electronics. Without the PCB, what will the components attach to? Without advancements in printed circuit board technology, products of the future would be impossible. It is our responsibility to be there when our customers need us—today and in the future. That means recognizing the latest trends and making the most of them. Here's what I see is trending in microelectronics.

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June 22, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Facing an Exciting Future

Trends today will determine the future, and things will change at such a rapid pace that the next 20 years will be nothing like the last 20 years. This is especially true when it comes to manufacturing. We already see the trends, ideas, and technologies we wouldn’t have even dreamed of even 10 years ago. Personally speaking, I am constantly amazed at the high level of technology and automation we are bringing into our facility right now. Many of our new machines actually have artificial intelligence, where they learn as they work. They get smarter by doing what they should be doing.

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May 30, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Three Tools to Deliver Great Customer Service

Being good enough is no longer enough. As the market becomes more competitive, the demand for great customer service increases. We are no longer competing with rival companies in our own field; we are up against the best in the world. Our customers understand great customer service. Now they want it from all the companies they deal with. They’ve been to Disney World, ordered from L.L. Bean and Nordstrom’s, booked airline tickets and rental cars on Expedia—and they know how easy those transactions can be. Now they want it from us too. Here are three tools we use to deliver the best customer service.

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April 28, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Hey World, Our Products Matter

One of today's biggest challenges is finding, hiring, and retaining good and solid employees. Some people blame the times, while others blame the workforce, especially millennials. If that’s the way you want to go, then fine, but I must warn you that with that mindset, you will never find what you’re looking for. Instead, let's shift the paradigm and become better ambassadors for our industry.

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March 21, 2023

Standard of Excellence: The Rise of NPI

There is no doubt that innovation is on the rise. The number of new products being developed post-COVID is staggering. Our OEMs are not only upgrading their current products, making them better than ever, they are also developing new products at a very rapid rate. But what does that mean for us? Will we continue sending our products overseas? Will be willing to join forces and find solutions? Anaya Vardya gives this idea some thought.

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February 22, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Emerging Trends Spell Success for Industry’s Future

There is something happening in our industry—you can feel it. Before the COVID pandemic, there had been some subtle shifts, but now in the (hopefully) post-COVID era, we can expect to see some significant changes in our industry—and in the world as well. From where I sit, here are some of the noteworthy trends that I see shaking up the industry in the very near future. In fact, most of them have already begun making waves.

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January 25, 2023

Standard of Excellence: Progress Through Partnership

This column has spent a great deal of time talking about the importance of partnerships and how they can allow us to accomplish more than we ever could on our own. Solid vendor partnerships, partnerships with our customers, and even partnerships with our competitors all offer valuable benefits to the company looking to achieve more. But most of the discussions on this topic have been preoccupied with either reflecting on history or contemplating the present. Today I thought it might be interesting to instead discuss what partnerships might look like in the future as well as strong examples from the recent past.

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December 21, 2022

Standard of Excellence: The Future of Partnerships

During the first few months of the pandemic, we were all comforted by the words, “We are all in the together.” It became a kind of comforting mantra, suggesting that we stood together as equals as we faced this new danger. During those early, dark days, we clung to that idea, telling ourselves that, somehow, we would meet the challenges and get through—together. It was around that same time that I started thinking and writing about partnerships, something that I have continued to enjoy doing ever since.

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November 09, 2022

Standard of Excellence: The Power of Partnerships

Now more than at any other time in our history, solid partnerships hold the key to success for all companies. If the past two and a half years of challenges and issues have taught us anything, it is that by increasing the number of stronger partnerships we have, the more we can accomplish and the more secure our companies will be able to handle the future. We should all be looking for strong and cooperative partnership where we all help one another to do things that neither of us could do alone.

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October 19, 2022

Standard of Excellence: What Are Your Partnership Expectations?

As we delve deeper into the idea of formulating great partnerships with our customers, our suppliers, and even our competitors, we must constantly ask ourselves what we can expect from them and in turn what they can expect from us. There should be a mutual understanding of what these expectations are, and they should be, well, expected. We should be able to count on one another as partners to work with one another, combining and coordinating our expectations so they will always be mutually beneficial. Here are some of the mutual expectations I have with my partners.

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September 13, 2022

Standard of Excellence: We’re Working Together—and It Shows

Now more than ever we need to work with one another. The times have evolved to where no one can do it alone. All the challenges that were brought on by the pandemic have only accelerated the need for finding new and innovative ways to work together. When I started in this business, there was little or no interactions between PCB companies, for example. We all operated in silos, as they say. We seldom communicated or shared technology ideas and improvements. Although the pandemic accelerated that change in attitude, it was already inevitable that a time of more cooperation and partnership was well on its way.

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August 17, 2022

Standard of Excellence: The New Age of Cooperative Partnerships in North America

For the past few years, I have written frequently about being partners with our suppliers and our customers. Now I thought it might be time to talk about being partners with each other. By each other, I mean the whole North American PCB industry—PCB and PCBA shops, engineers, designers, and of course, our customers and suppliers. So, now is the time to truly start working together; that includes PCB designers, fab houses, PCBA companies, and our vendors and suppliers. If I may dare, I declare this the new age of cooperative partnership in North America.

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July 20, 2022

Standard of Excellence: Six Fundamental Techniques to Sustain Partnerships Amid Rising Prices

These are unprecedented times. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. In fact, I’ve shared my views in this column many times that we must seek out new ways of doing business, especially in doing business with one another. Let’s work together toward success. No matter what, partners must look out for each other, even to the point of making sure we’re making enough money to survive and to invest in the future.

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June 22, 2022

Standard of Excellence: Respect for the Most Preferred Partnership—Your Employees

There are many types of partnerships in business, but without a doubt the most important one is with our employees. Especially considering today’s labor shortages, it’s critical that we establish true and appealing partnerships with our employees, especially those who are just coming on board. I look at this as an opportunity and chance to improve the way we work with our employees. It’s a chance to not only create a better partnership with our team members but to find better ways to partner with them.

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May 25, 2022

Standard of Excellence: From Partnership to Greatness

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade. Not because it will be easy, but because it will be hard. And because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because the challenge is one, we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win." John F Kennedy Rice University September 12, 1962. That speech represents the onset of the greatest example of peacetime cooperative partnership this country has ever seen, before or since. A partnership that was based on a great positive achievement for not only our country but for all mankind.

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April 20, 2022

Standard of Excellence: From Adversaries to Collaborators—Let’s Do This Together

Because of the results of the pandemic, we are experiencing shortages like we have never faced in our lifetime.Therefore, it is more important than ever that we all work together—and I really do mean all of us. Those of us who fabricate PCBs must open our minds and doors to the idea of working together. Where for so many years we competed to the point of treating one another as adversaries, we now must come together to form a cohesive partnership. Anaya Vardya explains.

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March 15, 2022

Standard Of Excellence: Partnering for a Complete Synergistic Solution

Now more than ever, our customers are looking for complete solutions. They are looking for quick turn new product introduction solutions that will include the three services: PCB design, fabrication, and assembly. They want to place their business as easily, simply, and quickly as possible. This means that they want to place one purchase order with one company and that company will act as the prime on the job and will give their other two partners their purchase orders. The three companies will then work together to provide their customer a complete synergistic solution.

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February 23, 2022

Standard of Excellence: Partners Help Each Other

I read the other day that the best place to get a referral or a testimonial is from your partners, the people who you work with. Things have changed. Now, your customers and the very people to ask and get a reference from. They are, after all, the ones who have the most vested interest in helping you succeed. They also want to build up your goodwill and the best way to do that is to tell people what a good company you are. Of course, they want you to succeed in your business because it contributes to their success as well.

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January 31, 2022

Standard of Excellence: Partnerships Made Us Stronger

It’s 2022, a brand-new year, things are going to be different, and we are going to change it up. We have now settled into the COVID life. Every time we think it’s going away, it comes back. We have spent over 22 months with this evil monster, and it looks like there is more to come. But the good news is that we are getting used to this. We have learned how to do things effectively during these especially challenging times. Some of us have increased our marketing, others have found different ways to communicate with our customers, and many of us, much to our surprise have found that our top numbers have been actually increasing in the past two years.

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December 22, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Partnership Is a Team Effort

The best way to develop and implement a true ongoing and productive partnership with your vendor/partners is to make it a full team effort. Each companies’ partnership team should have members from each of the company’s departments. For example, the vendor’s team should have someone from the shipping department coordinating with someone from your receiving department. The same with engineering, the same with quality and the same with operations. This coordination should be at all levels from the top down.

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November 22, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Great Customer Service is a Two-Way Street

We all enjoy great customer service. Actually, we love great customer service. We love it so much that we are always happy to tell everyone we know when one of our vendors provides us with great customer service. We actually want to let people know that we are getting special services from our vendors. We might even want to evangelize about them. And that is the point of this column. The best way to get great customer service from your vendor partner is to be open to it. Here are seven ways to be sure you always get the best customer service possible.

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October 27, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Partnering to Produce New and Innovative Products

One of the best features, the best benefits of working closer in partnership with your vendor partners is working with them to develop new products for the industry—whether it’s a new thermal management material with one of your laminate vendors or helping them develop a new piece of equipment that will benefit your entire industry. This is when a great partnership can serve to benefit everyone involved, even those not directly involved those in your industry who will benefit greatly by the new and innovative product you worked on. Talk about partnering productively!

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September 29, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Great Things Are Accomplished With Partnerships

There are some very simple steps to developing and sustaining a good partnership with your PCB vendor/partners, all based on treating your partners as you want to be treated. It's following the Golden Rule. But before you do that you have to get rid of that other golden rule, “he who has the gold makes the rules.”

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August 25, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Co-Marketing with Your Vendor Partners

This is certainly a time for all of us to pull together in the true spirit of cooperative partnership. There are even better ways to increase the level of partnership you have with your vendor now, and with your customers as well. One on the best ways is to do some co-marketing.

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August 16, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Working Through Shortages

As result of the pandemic, severe shortages—both real and created—from our offshore vendors is making it difficult for us to build and deliver products on time. Here are five tips for getting through this together.

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July 28, 2021

Standard of Excellence: The Beauty of a Partnership

Partnerships are more important than ever. Not only with your vendors as we regularly focus on in this column, but with your competitors as well. I believe that if we can all start working together in this new post-pandemic world, life will be much better for all of us individually but also better for our industry as a whole.

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May 13, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Dare to Share

We often talk about the value of working closely with your vendors to the point of making them partners. This strategy makes sense. The closer you are to your vendors, the more you help them, the better vendors they will be, and most importantly the better partners they will be. Now let’s take that idea to the next level, all the way to the point of a true partnership.

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April 12, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Finding the Right PCB Partners

The pandemic and also recent shifts in our geopolitical view of the world have changed the way we look at offshore PCB vendor partners, especially those in China. These two factors alone—increase in new technology, and an onshoring trend for buying more PCBs domestically—have caused a significant paradigm shift in choosing your PCB/ vendor partners.

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March 18, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Be the Vendor—Walk in Their Shoes

We have been constantly reminded over the years to step into our customers’ shoes: looking at things from our customers’ perspective, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, understanding the challenges they face to make it in their own marketplace. We have been advised that this is the best way to gain insight into what it takes for us to become valuable to our customers.

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February 11, 2021

Standard of Excellence: Being a Great Customer

If you want to have a truly successful partnership with your vendor, you have to get rid of the golden rule…no, not that one, but that old. worn out phrase, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” You can believe that if you want, but if you do, you can forget about having a true supplier/partnership with your vendors.

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January 14, 2021

Standard of Excellence: The Importance of Supplier Retention

We spend a great deal of time and money on attaining low customer turnover rates, making sure that we keep those good customers we worked so hard to attain. But what about holding onto our good PCB vendor/partners? We need to be sure that we are retaining our good suppliers with the same diligence that we hold on to our customers.

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December 14, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Going Public With Your Partner

One aspect of a great partnership with your vendors is to show the world how you are working together. Demonstrating how a great partnership can serve both your companies well and is beneficial to your industry too. Anaya Vardya shares nine ways to go public with your partner.

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November 23, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Bringing Your Salespeople Together

One of the most overlooked aspects of having a great partnership with your PCB vendors is making sure that your salespeople know each other. Anaya Vardya shares six key reasons to develop a partnership between your sales team and your PCB vendor's team.

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October 13, 2020

Standard of Excellence: 4 Areas That Will Improve by Next Year

As we continue to work our way through this pandemic, it makes us wonder about—and even yearn for—what things will be like one year from now. Looking ahead to what doing business will be like, Anaya Vardya shares four things that we have been forced to do today that we will still be doing—and, hopefully, doing even better than now—in October of 2021.

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September 21, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Five Ways to Ensure You Have the Right Military PCB Supplier

With the current shortage of qualified and certified military PCB suppliers, finding one has become more challenging than ever, and the trend toward consolidation over the past few years has only added to the shortage. Anaya Vardya shares five guidelines to consider when developing a bilateral relationship with your military PCB supplier.

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August 10, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Looking at the Future Together

With so many things changing right now, as well as lots of innovation happening and new products being developed, it’s important that you share your vision of the future with your PCB suppliers. Anaya Vardya shares six general logistical processes to use when working with customers on their product innovation and development.

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July 14, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Being a Valuable Customer

We always talk about being a valuable vendor, but what about being a valuable customer? Anaya Vardya shares five guidelines for making sure that you are always your suppliers’ most valued customer.

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June 08, 2020

Standard of Excellence: A Great Partnership Is a Two-Way Street

Are you a good and true partner to your PCB vendors? Are you doing everything you can to participate in an honest partnership where both partners equally look out for one another? Anaya Vardya shares 16 questions to consider when contemplating how good a partner you are to your PCB vendors and others.

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May 12, 2020

Standard of Excellence: You Get What You Pay For

When you work with a good PCB fabricator, you need to have a good understanding of the total value of the product. Many companies look for the bottom-dollar price of PCBs and do not take the time to make sure they are getting the very best deal they can. Anaya Vardya discusses the value of a PCB and what makes up the true costs.

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April 14, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Partnership in Challenging Times

Now, more than ever, we need to partner with one another. Traditionally, Anaya's columns have focused on developing a strong working bond with your PCB vendor partners. In this column, Anaya discusses how we must have partnerships with everyone we deal with during our daily business lives.

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March 17, 2020

Standard of Excellence: Successful R&D With Your PCB Partner

Now, more than ever, we have to rely on our PCB partners to help us with new product development. A great deal of trust and confidence in our PCB vendors is required to create and fulfill this type of partnership fruitfully. Anaya Vardya shares eight things that must be in place to have a successful R&D relationship with your PCB partner.

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February 24, 2020

Standard of Excellence: When Your PCB Vendor Gets in Trouble

It happens all the time, and even in the best-run companies: Something goes wrong. This is especially true in PCB fabrication, where some of the boards they fabricate can take up to 120 process steps to build. Anaya Vardya shares four ways that you can help your PCB vendors when they run into trouble.

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June 01, 2022

Standard of Excellence: Five Ways to Stay on Track With Your PCB Vendors

One of the most important aspects of the customer-vendor partnership is to keep the vendor aware of their standing with you. Anaya Vardya shares five ways to ensure that you and your PCB vendors are on the same page when it comes to how both of you are doing as working partners.

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December 10, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Respecting Your PCB Vendor Partner

One of the more important aspects of any partnership is mutual respect for one another. And, of course, this is extremely important when it comes to your PCB vendor partner. Many times, in the past, PCB fabricators have been treated as the third wheel in the relationship, stuck between their suppliers on one side and their vendors on the other. In most cases, both of these other entities were much larger and more powerful that the PCB shops.

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November 11, 2019

Invite Your PCB Partner to a Strategic Sales Meeting

The best way to work with your PCB vendors is to treat them as strategic partners. This means not only sharing your current needs but your future ones as well. I know that this requires a great deal of trust on your part as well as that of your PCB vendor partner. But if you have been reading this column, and doing everything we have recommended, then you should already be prepared for this. If you want your PCB vendor to be prepared to meet your future needs, you have to tell them what they are; it’s that simple.

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October 15, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Your PCB Technology Partner

There are regular PCB vendor relationships, and then there are the partnerships where you invest in future projects, such as developing processes for a new technology where you will have to share the work, responsibility, and success of the project. In short, project partnerships require a much deeper and more trusting relationship with your vendor.

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September 24, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Great Partnerships Are Forged in Adversity

When you’re in the PCB business, the one thing you can count on is that something will go wrong; it always does. Here are six steps to not only help and support your vendor through problematic times but also use the adversity as an opportunity to develop a deeper and more productive relationship.

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August 28, 2019

Standard of Excellence: How Strong Is Your Vendor Partnership?

For the past year, I’ve talked about various aspects of developing a great vendor-customer relationship with your PCB fabricators from trust to confidentiality and sharing the future. Here are 10 questions to ask yourself when testing the strength of your current partnership with your vendor.

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July 23, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Finding a Global Solution With Your Domestic Supplier

As the world goes global, so does the PCB industry. It is no longer sufficient to have a domestic PCB vendor; it has become critical to have a portal to offshore PCB acquisitions as well. But here are six reasons why, in many cases, it is better to go through your own domestic PCB supplier when you want to take advantage of the global PCB vendor base.

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June 24, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Choosing the Right Replacement Vendor

What happens when you have all of the suppliers you need, but a larger firm acquires one of them all of a sudden, and there is only one qualified supplier left when there used to be two. As a smart PCB user, you always want to keep your options open in case you are going to have to qualify another supplier to buy your PCBs from.

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June 03, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Three Ways to Face the Future With Your PCB Suppliers

Once you have established a solid, trusting relationship with your PCB vendor, you can start working together developing new products, technologies, and in some cases, services. There are even times when your PCB supplier will bring projects to you. Here are three ways that you can work with your PCB suppliers to face the future.

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April 29, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Four Tips on Listening to Your PCB Suppliers

Once you have done your due diligence, have developed a strong working partnership with your PCB suppliers, and now feel confident that those suppliers are the right ones, the next step is to recognize that your PCB suppliers are indeed the true experts, and that you can trust them enough to listen to them. Here are four tips on listening to and learning from your suppliers to ensure that you have the best PCB value that money can buy.

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April 02, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Buy Based on Value, Not Price

There are only two ways to buy PCBs; the first is based on price, which is the wrong way because it encourages a very shallow relationship based on just one thing—the price of the boards; and the second, and right, is based on value. A great company should understand what it means to buy value.

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April 01, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Microwave PCB Bonding Methods—What Designers Need to Know

The primary advantage of using thermoplastic films is their low electrical loss factor. PTFE multilayer boards are well known for their excellent electrical properties, but using a hybrid construction of a high-loss epoxy-based prepreg would defeat the purpose of the PTFE. While a particular bonding film may not exactly match the dielectric constants of the laminate, the effect of any difference is typically negligible, or if not, the board can be designed to allow for the difference. The downside is that thermoplastic film bonding is typically limited to low layer PCBs and not suited for sequential lamination.

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February 19, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Seven Things Your PCB Vendor Can Teach You

One of the great things about having a good PCB vendor is that they can teach you and keep you informed about when it comes to their technologies, products, and business. Just as you and your company are experts in your technology, they are experts in theirs.

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January 15, 2019

Standard of Excellence: Keep Your PCB Supplier Sharp

The best way to create a solid and productive partnership with your PCB supplier—and all of your suppliers for that matter—is to keep an open line of communication with them. No matter what kind of relationship you currently have with your suppliers, you can never communicate enough. Let them know at all times what you need from them.

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December 03, 2018

Standard of Excellence: Preparing Your Vendors for the Future

Now, it’s time to talk about the future with your PCB vendors. Referring to our previous columns, if you’ve done everything right so far, you will now have a strong working relationship with your PCB supplier. They understand all they need to know to fabricate perfect boards for you at this time. With trust and respect between you, you’ve truly formed a strong partnership going into the future.

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October 29, 2018

Standard of Excellence: Forging Partnerships Through Adversity and Problem Solving

For the past few months, this column has discussed how to find and work with a great PCB vendor, and most importantly, how to form a strong, productive partnership. This month, Anaya Vardya will address how adversity can forge a great partnership between you and your PCB vendor that will last for life.

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October 01, 2018

Standard of Excellence: Working for the Future—Partnering with PCB Vendors on Innovative Technology

The true test of the vendor-customer relationship comes when you need innovative PCBs—boards that are not easily found in the common marketplace and are so technologically advanced that they require your designers and suppliers to work together to go where neither has before.

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August 13, 2018

Standard of Excellence: Preparing for the Future with the Right Supplier

Is your PCB supplier ready to take you into the future? Sure, they are doing a good job today, but what about tomorrow? What will happen when new designs require boards to be made with thermal or RF materials, or have lines widths down to two mils?

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July 23, 2018

Material Selection: The Key to RF/Microwave Success

This month's column is written by Anaya Vardya and John Bushie. In today’s environment, there are a number of suppliers that may have similar materials but price points and lead times may vary. If you are open to trying different options, it is a good idea to work closely with your PCB fabricator so they can educate you on these aspects. Another option is to do parallel builds with multiple materials in the early stages of honing a new design to determine the optimum material set.

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June 12, 2018

Standard of Excellence: Making Your PCB Fabricator Your PCB Partner

Are your PCB needs exceeding your vendor base’s capabilities? Do you feel that your suppliers are no longer able to keep up with your PCB needs? Do your designers feel limited by your vendors’ limited capabilities? Are you finding an issue locating alternate sources for PCBs due to the consolidation of the larger shops in our industry? If so, you are not alone.

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January 10, 2018

Standard of Excellence: 5 Things a Total Global Solutions Supplier Can Provide

Our world now extends far beyond the traditional brick and mortar of the domestic board suppliers of yesteryear. Now our customers demand that PCB fabricators provide them with a complete and total printed circuit board solution, from domestically built ITAR-registered defense and aerospace boards to high-volume, offshore solutions.

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August 17, 2017

Standard of Excellence: Customers are Shooting for the Stars—Are We Coming?

For years we have been calling them “science projects,” those PCB orders that did not quite fit into our normal process stream and therefore needed special attention, as well as special handling. Often, we have had to use trial and error to come up with just the right process to successfully complete the order.

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May 17, 2017

Standard of Excellence: The Challenges of Hiring Good People and Methods for Success

Increasingly, we hear about the challenges of finding and hiring good people in our industry. We are being hit on all sides; much of our work force is aging out while young people don’t seem to be too interested in joining the printed circuit board industry. Let’s face facts: Fewer young people are going to college to become circuit board process engineers.

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May 01, 2017

Standard of Excellence: The Advantages of Flex and Rigid-Flex Circuits

Since their introduction, flexible and rigid-flex circuits have been steadily moving from the fringe of electronic interconnection towards its center. Today, flex and rigid-flex circuits are found in countless products from the very simple to the highly complex. The reasons for this shift to the center are numerous; most of them are related to the advantages they offer. An examination of some of the benefits and advantages will make this clear.

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March 08, 2017

Standard of Excellence: Staying Prepared with Operations

Handling the operations of a PCB company these days is a challenge, to say the least. When I started in 1979, we were building single-sided, double-sided, four-layer multilayers, and the occasional six-layer if you really had your act together. We were using FR-4 materials sprinkled in with an occasional polyimide build.

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December 21, 2016

Standard of Excellence: Selling Technology—A PCB Engineer Transitions to Sales

Selling technology today takes a great deal of time, patience and most of all knowledge of the product. There was a time when a salesperson was just that, a salesperson. Now, with the onset of all the new technologies, from RF and metal backed boards to flex and rigid-flex boards, to HDI and microvia boards and heavy copper boards, a salesperson must know what he’s talking about.

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November 29, 2016

Standard of Excellence: RF Microwave Technology—The Future is Now

Although RF/microwave technology has been around for a considerable amount of time, many people are still not sure exactly what it is. This month, I am going to dedicate my column to explaining exactly what it is, why it is used, and in what products is it used. I’ll also discuss who needs it.

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November 18, 2016

Standard of Excellence: Let’s Get Flexible

Although flex and rigid-flex technology has been around for many years, it is only in recent years that it has come into its own. The reason for the increased requirements for the flex and rigid-flex technology is simple: Devices are getting smaller.

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August 29, 2016

Communication Breeds Success

We all need to talk to one another. You need to work closely with your customers. And we all need to work with the new generation of PCB designers and design engineers, many of whom have never set foot in a board shop. Fortunately, they make up for their lack of DFM knowledge with their hunger for information.

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May 25, 2016

LED and Metal-Backed Technology—Today and in the Future

Probably one of the hottest, or should I say coolest, technologies today is LED. I would also venture to say it is one of the fastest growing as well...

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July 11, 2016

The Future is in Fine Lines

The age of much finer lines and spaces is upon us. After years of slowly moving towards this technology our customers are now demanding that all of us provide them with fine lines and spaces.

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April 06, 2016

Tips for Finding a Great PCB R&D Partner

This new column, Standard of Excellence, represents a cooperative writing effort by a team of experts at American Standard Circuits. This month, we begin with CEO Anaya Vardya, who focuses on R&D. In his piece, he provides his insights on what characteristics to look for in a good R&D PCB fabrication vendor partner, and a few things that are expected of them to do for you.

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