Time for a fresh look at manufacture

As lights are beginning to flicker at the end of the GFC tunnel, most governments and companies are planning, or in some cases implementing, the move from survival tactics to the task of mapping out the way forward in a post-GFC world. It will undoubtedly be a very different place, and arguably is already. One recent response was pre-election campaign in the UK that lobbied for a return to indigenous manufacturing, which has been in a rapid downhill slide since around 1998. The March 2010 Manufacturing Summit, which argued for the re-industrialisation of the UK, pushed for action in engineering education, a pro-manufacturing political consensus, financial incentives and cultural change. Put simply, revitalising manufacturing in the UK has the potential to clear the current national debt. Whether re-energising the UK manufacturing industry is practical and achievable is a whole discussion in itself, but one thing that's certain is it will take time to happen. Revamping education, promoting cultural change and implementing government policies (or even debating them) is painfully slow. In the meantime, imported goods will exceed those exported, and manufacturing will be outsourced to other countries. In the electronics industry for example, outsourcing manufacture has been a very attractive proposition for longer than we might care to remember. The drive for company profits (or even survival), the obligation to shareholders and often a lack of any other viable option means that the decision to have boards, assemblies and housings made abroad is almost a 'no-brainer'. But as most design engineers know, it can be fraught with its own challenges. The distances and in many cases, language barriers involved can lead to significant delays when there's a manufacturing problem. Few designs, for example, move to the prototype or production stages without errors – the incorrect board revision was sent, an electrical rules problem has slipped through to the Gerber files, or a specified component does not match its board footprint. This in itself is a potential argument for local manufacturing, where a lack of language, distance and even cultural barriers allows problems to be more quickly identified and corrected. The flow on effect would be reduced design delays, faster time to market and perhaps ironically, a comparable project cost to one that's dependent on manufacture in another country. Nevertheless, both manufacturing alternatives will benefit enormously from reducing those design release errors in the first place. The conventional approach to this is locking down the design process by manually controlling change, but the inevitable casualty is innovation, because that relies on open design exploration, rapid change and experimentation. The path forward, and a way to give local electronics manufacturing an edge, is to implement an electronics design environment that offers built in systems that maintain a high degree of data integrity without restricting design freedom. This would include all the controlled versioning, revision tracking and design verification capabilities as part of the design environment, and offer an automated, push button design release process that takes the risk out of sending a design revision to production. In a business landscape where we need to reassess the fundamentals of how we do electronic product design, the long neglected area of electronic design data management and its connections to manufacturing is ripe for this evolutionary change. A design system that implements a high degree of data integrity and a controlled design release process can reduce errors and time to market, free design engineers to innovate and even deliver a competitive advantage to local manufacturing.