So Many Standards Committees, So Little Time

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

During the IPC Summer Meetings and Panelpalooza in Raleigh, North Carolina, I met with Leo Lambert, vice president and director of technology at EPTAC. We discussed IPC’s recent efforts to revamp the way standards are developed and interpreted as well as changes to training and education committees and a variety of methods for eliminating errors and duplicated comments when revising standards.

Andy Shaughnessy: Another day, another show, Leo. You’re the chair for a couple of committees, so can you tell us what your committees have been doing at the summer meetings?

Leo Lambert: Back in the day, I was the chair of the J-STD-001 task group of the Assembly and Joining Committee; now, I’m the chair of the IPC-A-600 Committee. IPC is reorganizing and taking a look at the way the standards are being developed, the way the standards are interpreted, and how the test programs are going to be conducted. There are also new sets of policies, rules, and procedures for the training programs—one for CIT/MIT, one for CIS, and one for CSE—which everyone is anticipating. They have released the initial version, but there are still corrections that need to be addressed and implemented.

In the meantime, this delay creates a lot of angst for the people who are using them, and we had a meeting this morning on some of those issues. Today, we had training meetings, which are very important to the development of the programs; however, everyone wants to attend all of the meetings. Therefore, with so many people involved, it is difficult to reach a consensus in a short period of time since everyone has some input and want to be heard. I understand wanting to attend all of the meetings, but then you realize that there are only so many hours in the day, so it is slow-moving.

Since we’re involved in the training business, we need to go to the training meetings because that’s the material that we’re going to be using and presenting to the students. Additionally, there are many mistakes in those documents that must be corrected, and the new IPC organization is addressing all of these. However, it will take time and patience. These errors are repeated at each training program by all of the training centers, and multiple inputs are sent to the IPC, which become difficult to address in a timely manner.

To read the rest of this interview, which appeared in the September 2019 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.