Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Beware the Snake Oil Salesman

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...I was talking to my friend Bob Tarzwell recently about the new "miracle solutions" for building circuit boards. I'm not going to name them here, but you know the ones I’m talking about: A new miracle coating, or a new way to plate, or a new and more efficient process that will revolutionize the way we build boards. I like to bring these up to Bob in the same way kids like to poke a hornet’s nest with a stick. Bob has never been one to keep his opinions to himself and I consider him a bonafied mythbuster when it comes to "snake medicine" solutions--especially when it comes to technology and particularly when it comes to PCB technology. Bob knows what he’s talking about.

After we had a good laugh about the latest and greatest way to fabricate PCBs we started talking about where these solutions come from. It seems that they are always thought up by someone who's not from our industry, but an associated industry--someone who's never built a PCB and thinks he can build it better. Why is that? Why is it these people think they can do it better?

Here's what Bob and I came up with: Our industry gets so little respect from customers and vendors, so little appreciation and understanding of the difficulty in building PCB they just don’t get what it takes to build a board. Reading about one new technology, for example, these geniuses claimed they could take the PCB fab process down from 16 steps to just eight, cutting the process time in half. Really? Are you kidding me? These guys are so ignorant of our process they think fabrication is a 16-step process? What about the 100 plus steps it takes to build a sequentially laminated blind and buried via board? Have they not heard of that?

I think one of the issues here is these guys think we're exaggerating. They must think we're all taking part in a vast and very intricate conspiracy making up elaborate lies about the complexity and difficulty of producing a PCB to fool the rest of the world rake in enormous profits year after year.

What I love about these guys, these great inventors, is that after we reject their inaccurate theories and unworkable process improvements they go around us and convince customers to try to make us adopt these "improvements." This is not a very hard thing to do since most of our customers also believe we are exaggerating the difficulties of fabricating boards (or cards as they like to call them to make sure they think they’re cheap and easy to produce) so that we can keep our prices sky high!

It amazes me that these people are still around, still selling their wares--their snake oil--and still getting an audience. And here’s the real kicker: They actually think they are going to get the board shops to license their processes or products. Who are they kidding?

Like I told Bob (after he stopped laughing), these inventors could someday stumble across the greatest, most efficient, easiest, and cheapest way to build boards--something that would really work--and not one board shop would ever agree to a licensing agreement, especially one that comes with a percentage of revenue payback payment plan. It's not going to happen.

Look guys, but building circuit boards is hard: It involves a lot of steps, a lot of different process phases, and gobs of capital equipment money. And then there is always the luck factor: No matter what you do something can always go wrong--something you have no control over--a power surge or outage, or weather effects like humidity, things that Lean or SPC will never stop, and that is just the way it is.

If you are interested in what we do and what it takes, I would suggest you call a local board shop and take a tour. You’ll come out of there with a renewed respect that will make you think twice the next time you're tempted to come up with a "one-step fits all process solution" to get your PCB vendors to use so they stop charging your those sky-high prices and raking in those obscene profits. It's only common sense.