Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Marcy’s Musings: All Things Material 

It wasn’t until I had been around the business block a bit that I truly understood the impact of inventory on one’s P&L. How a company manages its inventory has a tremendous effect on its financials. I saw many situations where “fixers” were hired to get an organization financially back on track. The companies then experienced some of their greatest gains in the first year by simply getting their inventory under control. This is material management at its most base level for a business, and in this June issue, we are talking about all things “material,” a popular and ever-evolving topic for PCB fabricators. 

"Materials management is the process of planning and controlling material flows. It includes planning and procuring materials, supplier evaluation and selection, purchasing, expenditure, shipping, receipt processes for materials (including quality control), warehousing and inventory, and materials distribution."¹ 

Traditionally, the inventory piece of materials management is discussed through a more commercial, retail-esque lens. Eighty percent of your sales will be from 20% of your products. You’ll stock more of what you sell and less of what you don’t sell. The base laminate on which a printed circuit board is manufactured is the most significant supply cost within a completed PCB. Though the 80/20 rule does not translate precisely to a manufacturing environment, it still holds a general truth for the PCB fabricator—storing large amounts of standard FR-4 material vs. smaller amounts of more exotic RF material types, for example. 

Yet, like anything regarding PCB manufacturing, nothing is as simple as in other business segments. Materials management also provides us with nuance and the need for a multifaceted and holistic systems approach for success. Beyond supply management, panel utilization and handling are critically important yield considerations.  When you are building high mix/low volume and high technology products, materials management and overall cost containment are even greater challenges. Thus, it is no surprise that the discussion around the base substrate materials for PCBs is ongoing and robust. 

This month’s issue of PCB007 Magazine features an interview with Anaya Vardya, CEO of American Standard Circuits. He illustrates this delicate dance by outlining his facility’s approach to tightly managing inventory while balancing supplier lead times and customer requirements. In an enlightening interview with Ed Kelley, CEO of Four Peaks Innovation and former CTO of Isola, we discuss the continuous development of new material types and how this broad spectrum of hybrid and bondply materials has allowed traditional high-speed designs to be manufactured using non-traditional “RF” materials. 

Flex circuit fabricator Flexible Circuit Technology highlights how one’s engineering and procurement employees are highly empowered to affect your overall material cost. They also address the increasingly important role of automation in material handling, speaking to quality and yield, especially for flexible circuits. 

Columnist and industry veteran Mike Carano is back in the house, continuing the material discussion and breaking things down to the core: Dk, Df, drilling, and metallization. Mark Goodwin, COO of Ventec, an international laminate supplier, discusses material management from a large material supplier's perspective, reinforcing the need for an open and trusting relationship between the customer and their suppliers to secure manufacturing supply chains. 

Also in this issue, read my interviews with Tom Edman of TTM, newly appointed chair of the IPC Board of Directors, and Shane Whiteside of Summit Interconnect, newly appointed chair of PCBAA. Dovetailing well with this, columnist Travis Kelly, CEO of Isola, signs off as PCBAA chair and welcomes Shane into this important advocacy role. He notes that this association and the industry are just getting started with the important work of securing government support for the U.S. PCB supply chain. 

Prashant Patel, CEO of Alpha Circuit and newcomer to the PCB manufacturing industry, talks about the partnership he has built with his suppliers and how this has been critical in his ambitious endeavor of building a brand-new facility. Don Ball’s column this month is a perfect lead into our August issue about control of your wet processes, and Happy Holden’s monthly Tech Talk column declares that analog computing is making a comeback. 

Finally, workforce challenges are top of mind for all of us, so please read my interview with IPC VP of Education David Hernandez. Among his impressive credentials, he spent many years encouraging young people to enter technical fields. He speaks candidly about our current workforce challenges and what we must do to solve them. The interview is based on IPC’s most recently published white paper on that topic. 

It’s nearly summer, and I hope the sun is shining where you live. You may be taking some much-needed vacation time but remember that the industry's frenetic and exciting pace never slows down. 

References 

1. “Materials management,” Wikipedia.

This column originally appears in the June 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine​.