Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

Solid modeling is the process of constructing a 3D model through a series of additive and subtractive operations while always maintaining a calculable volume. Surface modeling is the process of constructing a 3D model through the process of defining each of the faces that are present in its geometry.

When the electronics world was preparing for the Chinese New Year (CNY) 2020, I don’t think any of us could have imagined what we would be planning for CNY 2021, and even fewer people would have predicted what we will be going to be up against in 2022.

The last 18 months have been some of the most challenging that many of us have had to deal with both personally and professionally. It has often felt like we were riding waves, coming closer to things getting a little more normal, only to have them change radically. Looking forward to the next 18 months, I don’t see those changes getting any easier for us or our industry.

Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic has been especially challenging for many electronics manufacturers. As the world’s production flood gates opened, deliveries that were on hold for the past year are now being asked to be rushed and pulled ahead.

Those of us who make our livings managing supply chain, the time of the year between Halloween and New Year’s Eve is always on the tense side. Known as the “Peak Season”, it seems to start earlier and earlier the more people turn to e-commerce.

New Normal. What is the New Normal? For those of us who work in electronics, most days it feels like a foreign concept. When you consider what our collective industries have gone through since 2018, when the U.S. vs. China trade war started, and the Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs went into effect, now into this Chinese New Year (CNY) and the global Coronavirus pandemic, it seems like the answer to that question is: normal is something we may never see again.

Anyone who has been in the business for more than five minutes understands that the rate of change in electronics hardware development can sometimes be overwhelming. Just this year at the University of Michigan, a team has developed the world’s smallest computer, measuring just 0.3mm to a side, smaller than a grain of rice.

Running production operations is a daunting task for manufacturers. You want your operations to be highly productive, flexible with the changing needs of customers, and to run efficiently. At the same time, you want to develop ways to reduce process costs without reducing the quality of works-in-progress (WIP) parts or finished contracted products.

Every year, post Labor Day, most of us are focusing on getting “back to work” and recovering from whatever the summer holidays brought our way. As the weather starts to cool, and the sports start to change, those of us who work in supply chain management, procurement, and shipping immediately turn our eyes to what has become the constant fourth quarter challenge: getting our companies through peak season with no delays or surcharges.

At Epec, engineers are expected to find innovative solutions to problems and develop them quickly and accurately so that customers can get quality products delivered on time. In this blog post, I will discuss how the 80-20 rule can be used in conjunction with our classic engineering design process to reach solutions faster.