Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

Maybe you have heard of technical writing before, or maybe this is your first-time hearing about it. The chances are good, however, that you have seen or experienced technical writing already in your life. It is an established practice within the industrialized world, but what is it?

At Epec we work on such a varied and technical catalog of products, so our engineers must be comfortable leveraging every manufacturing technology available to them in order to create solutions in design and production. One of the most important technologies that we use is 3D printing.

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) have become an integral part of everyday modern life, both at work and at home. PCBs were at one time found primarily where you would have expected them to reside inside computers, calculators, televisions, and other such obviously electronic devices, but now they present nearly everywhere.

Working in the manufacturing industry, you’ve probably noticed the letters RoHS or REACH on various documentation or even browsing our website. But, have you ever wondered what these letters stand for or what the certification that comes with them entails?

In my last blog post, I reviewed the 5 why problem-solving method. In this blog post, we will continue this discussion so if you have not seen Part 1, I suggest you read that post first and then come back here.

In my last blog post, Five Why Root Cause Analysis Starts with a Good Problem Statement, I recommended that problem-solving teams develop well-crafted problem statements. This blog post will discuss the best practices for the five why method of root cause analysis.

While it's true that The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has long issued a series of recommended standards for electrical and electronics design, those standards do not actually specify wiring color purposes in the way that a lot of people think they do. This is surprising given that those standards do contain extensive discussion on wiring and power cables.

If you were to ask 5 separate people to explain the definition of keypad, likely you would receive 5 completely different answers that all center around the same basic concept. According to Wikipedia a keypad is a set of buttons arranged in a block or "pad" which bear digits, symbols or alphabetical letters (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypad). While this definition is correct, when communicating to a potential user interface supplier the term keypad requires further elaboration.

It's never a great sign of the times when you wake up every day and know you need to check the news before starting work to see what the newest challenges are you're going to have to deal with. Unfortunately, this trend became standard practice within our industry in 2018. Typically, most companies spend their time and money trying to find new ways to speed up service or new products to help their customers. But for most of this past year, it was about working closely with your customers on their existing business to minimize damage from all the new costs that were quickly being added to our industry.

The average American “holiday season” usually begins somewhere around Halloween and continues at a frantic pace through January 1^st. For those of us who work in supply chain management, the holiday season has a completely different meaning.