-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Contact Columnist Form
Expanding Your Comfort Zone
In the engineering world, there is increasing pressure to be a specialist, especially in technical roles. Does this intense focus on specialisation work against us, however, when we consider the wider requirements of the business? How can we bring added value to specialist roles, such as PCB layout designer or SMT machine programmer, which are key elements of the wider production introduction team, without getting distracted from specific objectives?
Software tools help us focus excellence in a specific role, but software must now add more benefit from team environments, even when derived from a widely spread collaborative flow, and bring a step change improvement in performance without the cost of distraction from our specialist operations.
As technology continues to evolve, there is always more to learn, whether it is how to better design a PCB or how to better prepare programs for SMT machines. These are not new tasks, but people performing them are continuously pushed to achieve greater efficiencies and performance. What often happens is that we end up with certain roles that are very specialized in focus, experience, and outlook. Software tools have grown up around these kinds of roles, providing added value, guidance and management, and in effect, promoting the specialisation itself. The issue, then, is how to effectively connect these specialist roles into a team or collaborative flow. Can we afford to distract people from their core strengths by asking them to acquire some level of expertise in areas that are related to their tasks, but outside of their direct role? How can we optimise teamwork as part of a flow without losing our focus on individual key goals?
Let’s take, for example, the PCB layout designer, a specialist on the design team who uses software to create PCB layouts. This role involves the use of specialised skills and experience, taking physical and electrical requirements from the schematic diagrams and laying out circuits on a PCB. Several cycles of PCB prototypes may be needed during the design phase to correct issues from the electrical design, the physical form and fit of a PCB into a product, and mistakes in the layout itself. Specialist design tools provide support in these areas, enabling the skills of the layout designer to be maximised.
Read the full column here.
Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of SMT Magazine.
More Columns from The Essential Pioneer's Survival Guide
If It's My Data, I Can Do What I Want, Right?The Essential Pioneer's Survival Guide: One Size Fits All?
Smart for Smart’s Sake, Part 3: Unification & Traceability
Smart for Smart's Sake, Part 2: Material Management
The 'New Face' of Automotive Traceability
Industry 4.0: Who Benefits?
To Be Lean is to Be Human
Stop the SMT Conspiracy, Part 2: Abduction