Battling Counterfeit Electronics in Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Paul Jarski, product development manufacturing leader at Case New Holland (CNH), discusses his extensive experience with counterfeit electronics throughout his career. He highlights the challenges faced during market allocations, where counterfeit parts infiltrated supply chains and causing significant issues. Paul recounts the rigorous processes implemented to detect and prevent counterfeits, including advanced material analysis and testing. Counterfeit parts occasionally slipped through despite these measures, leading to costly and time-consuming audits and verifications to ensure product integrity and safety. 

Nolan Johnson: Paul, tell me a little about your background.  

Paul Jarski: 

Paul Jarski: I currently work with large and compact tractors at CNH. I’m the liaison between the product development and manufacturing organizations. 

Prior to this role, I’ve spent most of my career in agricultural technology, both with CNH and other companies. With the advances in farming technology, the development of rugged electronics equipment has been and continues to be a critical part of the business. 

Johnson: So, you have an extensive background in managing counterfeiting issues. 

Jarski: Yes. For most of my career, I have been involved in the manufacturing, quality, and supply chain portions of the AG electronics business. I started my career in this area as a process/quality engineer as a liaison between my company and EMS providers. We'd get a product stable and move it to the EMS provider. We still owned the design and controlled everything in the BOM, the AML. 

We all know the electronics industry goes through allocations every three to four years. When that happened, we looked for parts. We went to the broker market if we couldn’t get them through normal chains. 

I remember some of the first brokered parts we bought in the mid-2000s. After the 2008 economic meltdown, everybody in the electronics industry had slashed their capacity. For the ag industry, it was a blip. In the space of a year, we went from building at 100% capacity to cutting production to going all out and needing to increase equipment capacity. When everybody in the electronics component industry had cut capacity, we had to go to the broker market to find components. However, we also realized the inherent danger in this approach, so we knew we had to be careful of what we purchased. 

When we purchased components from the secondary (broker) market, we started implementing checks to verify authenticity. I remember clearly some of the first counterfeits. As soon as they came in, we suspected something was wrong. The labels were poorly printed on the reels, the silk screening on the physical parts wasn't spelled correctly, and you could rub the labeling off the part. I remember us throwing some samples in the X-ray, only to find there was nothing inside. We saw a lot of crude stuff. If you had an X-ray and a cotton swab with acetone, you could tell if it was a counterfeit. 

Fast forward to the next market allocation in the 2013-14 timeframe and we found that counterfeiters had advanced their game significantly.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the October 2024 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.