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Nolan’s Notes: The Conveyor Belt Effect

How many times have you watched a conveyor belt in a movie played out for comedic effect? It’s a familiar trope: The belt starts out slowly, then increases its speed, until chaos ensues. Think “I Love Lucy,” “Star Wars,” and Charlie Chaplin in “City Lights.” These are perfect metaphors for this issue on workflow management, where planning your workflow on the manufacturing floor in these challenging times sometimes feels like being just one step away from disaster—or safety.

I remember being introduced to the “conveyor belt” effect in my early college days. I had started dating a young lady and because neither of us were flush with cash, our dates consisted of attending a film lab for the English department’s “History of Comedy in Film” course. We weren’t enrolled in the course, yet we were rich in resourcefulness, so it was a perfect date. We’d hold hands and laugh while watching the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Keystone Cops, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton (my personal favorite).

These early films taught me a lot about the roots of comedy in cinema and, as it turns out, quite a bit about workflow management. The one film that served as the crux for the course was Chaplin’s 1931 film “City Lights,” a dystopian and indeterminate industrial setting for our anti-hero. It’s easy to say that “City Lights” presents an Orwellian world, a precursor to the one created by George Orwell 18 years later.

The film centers around the Tramp’s work in a factory, where the Tramp is both contrary to established processes, but highly competent in his own way. The dystopian future is represented by a company boss who can use a two-way television to micromanage his employees, the Tramp in particular. (Interestingly, electronic television had only been demonstrated two years prior to this movie.) Perhaps the pinnacle of the movie is the famous scene in which the Tramp gets pulled through the machinery itself. Where he should meet with a bone-crunching death in all the gears, he instead comes out unscathed (as the Tramp always does) and even tightens bolts with a wrench as he moves down the path. It was the type of scene I would see played out repeatedly over the years in other comedies. For some reason, it just always works.

While we may have to keep a light heart about the challenges we face today, we also realize the constantly shifting, chaotic supply chain has wreaked havoc on workflow management. For this month's SMT007 Magazine, we reached out to several EMS companies and found common threads of struggle and confusion. Planning the workflow onto the manufacturing floor must simply feel like a trip through the machine with the Tramp every single day.

Maybe you feel more like the masterful Lucille Ball in her infamous conveyor belt scene in the candy factory, or C3PO having parts switched out as he narrowly escapes getting clobbered by the robotic arms. Maybe you’re more like “The Flintstones,” scrambling down a belt the opposite way as quickly as you can. It’s a fast-paced world that never stops, but it’s how we approach our situations that makes the difference.

In our interview with Jason Sciberras of Saline Lectronics, he details some of his “conveyor belt” moments and how these challenges led to innovation, new software, and a company that is thriving. He’s finding his way out of the chaos by using smart tools, smart people, and a level head. We learned about some new best practices for supply chain monitoring and how that increased awareness has trickled down to the scheduling department.

We followed up with CalcuQuote and Cogiscan, two business organizations that provide software options now critical to stability in the supply chain for EMS companies. The ever-thought-provoking Michael Ford contributes two pieces to this issue as he explores both best practices in worst-case scenarios, and modern inventory management.

I’m also excited to share with you a series of interviews from last month’s IPC Advanced Packaging Symposium, a two-day forward-looking event in Washington, D.C. You’ve probably already heard of substrates, interposers, and chiplets, and I promise there will be much more to discuss in coming months. But here’s a workflow management spoiler: Advanced packages will require a higher level of assembly precision and will add complexity to your workflow.

Chaplin’s “City Lights” was his first “talkie.” He saw the future of cinema with soundtracks as a dystopian world for his particular art form. In the closing scene, the Tramp walks off into the “sunset,” living life on his terms. But so many others embraced the new technology and thrived. Here’s to hoping no one chooses to exit the business rather than adapt to the new world order.

This column originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of SMT007 Magazine.