Meet Tibi Baranyi: He’s an Expert in Engineering, Standards, and Fishing

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

IPC committee members come from all over the world and have a variety of educational backgrounds and life experiences. Fortunately, they bring that knowledge and diversity to the development of IPC standards. In this interview, Tiberiu (Tibi) Baranyi, technology group manager at Flextronics Romania in Timisoara, discusses Flex, fishing, and figuring out the best way to participate in IPC standards development.

What is a typical day like for you at Flextronics Romania?

Tibi Barayni: I lead the technology group, and the best thing is that there is something new every day. I am part of a team that works on projects from start to finish, mainly with manufacturing items but also projects that are under development. I never have a boring day. There is a diversity of industry segments at Flex, ranging from industrial to medical and automotive. Given the spread and diversity of the products, there is always a new challenge and a need for solutions; that is the best part of my job.

Do you have a favorite part?

I have two favorites: one is automotive because of the complexity of the work requirements and the other is telecom, which is all about the complexity of the product and, of course, the use of fiber optics.

Timisoara, Romania, is your home. It was the first city in Europe to introduce electric street lighting, and the actor Johnny Weissmuller (who played Tarzan) was from Timisoara. What makes the city special to you?

There are several reasons. This is the town that adopted me 20-something years ago. I grew up nearby, came here to attend university, and never left. I went to one of the best schools in Romania, the Politechnica University of Timisoara. This city was and still is a hub for education.

Timisoara is very mixed in ethnicities and cultures and is constantly growing and expanding. It has about 500,000 people living in the metropolitan area but had just 300,000 when I came here. It is the third largest city in Romania, and it is where the revolution started in 1989 that ended the communist regime. There are many global companies here, and the population is a mix of Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, Serbians, Bulgarians, Jewish, etc. It is well-connected to the rest of Europe, and is a short flight to Munich, Germany, with connections to London, Barcelona, and Milan.

Let’s look at your IPC activities. You joined your first task group in February 2017. What drew you to standards development?

I started with the IPC-J-STD-001/IPC-A-610 Automotive Addendum Subcommittee. There are so many interpretations of the standard and people in the industry tend to know what IPC puts in the standard, but they have their own perspective on how the standard should be used.

I was mainly working with the automotive segment at Flex and it was handy for me, but I just wanted to get a deeper understanding of how to use the documents. It worked well to put together an addendum that made sense for industry use, and meets the needs of the automotive industry.

Apparently, I was doing a good job, because I was encouraged to move into the leadership position of the A-610 main group. It was very interesting to work with committee members and get them to contribute. Sometimes I only had a few days to go through up to 200 comments, and I had to steer a meeting where it was not unusual to have 130 in attendance and everyone wanted to speak—but not monopolize the discussion to debate one comment for three or four hours. I was trying to negotiate with those large communities in getting the standard published. It was challenging to get a consensus in a very limited time at face-to-face meetings.

To read the rest of this interview, which appeared in the Fall Issue of IPC Community, click here.