The Critical Role of Materials

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Materials and substrates are an ongoing discussion for PCB fabricators today, offering PCB designers and fabricators much more choice than was available two decades ago. When it comes to running a printed circuit board company, material management is a critical piece for operations. When you are doing high mix, lower volumes, material management can be an even greater challenge. This discussion with Anaya Vardya of American Standard Circuits sheds light on best practices, innovative approaches to vendor relationships, inventory management, and panel optimization, highlighting the critical role materials play in the success of electronics manufacturing today.

Marcy LaRont: Anaya, ASC is a high-tech PCB manufacturing facility that works with many different product and material types. What is your approach to material management?

Anaya Vardya: On the supply chain side of material management, we have a large range of materials used for the products we manufacture. For standard FR-4, we are fortunate to have a handful of different material vendors that stock in the Chicago area. This means we can minimize the amount of inventory we're holding inside our facility, which saves space and inventory dollars. We typically have multiple deliveries a week from these suppliers. In the worst case, we can drive over to the supplier and pick up material.

LaRont: Local sourcing is certainly key to just-in-time inventory management if you aren’t holding everything in-house. But what about less standard material types?

Vardya: Beyond FR-4, our strategies for holding stock and managing lead times are, out of necessity, a bit different. Because we have such a wide variance of materials and lead times, we proactively inform our customers of material lead times when we're quoting the job. If a specialty material needs to be manufactured, we determine the manufacturing lead time, shipping strategy, and cost and communicate that at the quote stage. Of course, it's the best information we have at that time. We live in a dynamic world, as you know.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the June 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.