June, 2021
www.us-tech.com
Navigating a New Normal in the Aftermath of the Pandemic
Continued from previous page
same level of adrenaline in front of a monitor. Somehow, subcon- sciously I think I’m watching a movie where the walking dead will reattach their limbs, join the stars and all head to the bar.” Solving a problem is a mix of tools and intuition. A fishbone
a strange motion from one opera- tor as they reached for parts in an overhead bin. “More careful obser- vation showed a very practiced move that allowed them to remove a salty potato chip from their lab pocket, insert it into their mouth and then remove the through-hole part with greasy fingers. Basically, the de-wetting occurred whenever the operator wanted a snack,” says Bentley. The wave soldering sys- tem was not the culprit and there
is still no analytical tool developed to detect hunger.
Breaking the Language Barrier
In the short term, if we can-
not immediately replace the “techie road warrior,” there must be an alternative. In 1999, Thierry Ballenghien, a PCB engineer and fabrication plant manager, saw an opportunity within the mass exodus of PCB
Page 45
shops from Europe to Asia. He realized that there was a need for an agent for European com- panies that were being pressured to buy PCBs from Asia. He understood that large
OEMs could develop their own strategies, but smaller compa- nies could not easily afford the infrastructure to manage techno- logically sophisticated and cus- tomized PCBs from a distance. It was also clear that simply buying PCBs from Asia and Continued on page 49
™
Thierry Ballenghien, creator of the business model that allows ICAPE to communi- cate with customers and suppliers in their own technical terminology and native languages.
diagram or the “five whys” can be done from anywhere and com- putations and CPK calculations can be done wherever one can plug in a laptop. These are some of the analytical tools. But, what one cannot do is
talk to the operators to ask ques- tions about what they have seen that may be unusual or if they have any particular insight. Never discount the observations of the people who see the process every day. Processes are sensi- tive to man, machine, method, materials, and Mother Nature. Our analytical tools can account for only some of these variables.
Chips for Thought Bentley relates an amusing
story about a time he was asked to solve a process problem that was random, yet persistent. The issue was de-wetting coming out of wave soldering at the end of a through-hole slide line. The Black Belt team had
analyzed all of the process vari- ables and tweaked the wave sol- der process to an extreme degree. The problem continued to reappear such that the compa- ny was forced to put an inspector at the end of the wave. “The team wanted to show
me all of their charts and process data, but I wanted to simply observe the process,” says Bentley. “The inspector was instructed to alert me when they found a defect. Soon, I was totally ignored just sit- ting on a stool with my laptop.” It wasn’t long before the inspector brought over the first defect. Bentley kept watching. He noticed
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