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NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders
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Leading from the Front
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Marcel Tremblay: The Olympic Mindset & Engineering Leadershippopular
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Anurag Gupta: Framework to Accelerate NPI
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Kyle Wiens on Why Design Repairability is Good for Business
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Nathan Ackerman on NPI: Do The Hard Thing First
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JDM Operational Excellence in NPI
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Building the Team
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Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production
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3 Lessons from Tesla’s Former NPI Leader
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Maik Duwensee: The Future of Hardware Integrity & Reliability
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Reject Fake NPI Schedules to Ship on Time
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Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria
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Screws & Glue: Getting Stuff Done
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Choosing the best CAD software for product design
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Screws vs Glues in Design, Assembly, & Repair
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Best Practices for Glue in Electronics
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A Practical Guide to Magnets
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Inspection 101: Measurements
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OK2Fly Checklists
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Developing Your Reliability Test Suite
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Guide to DOEs (Design of Experiments)
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Ten Chinese phrases for your next build
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NPI Processes & Workflows
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Production: A Primer for Operations, Quality, & Their Leaders
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Leading for Scale
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Proven Strategies for Collaborating with Contract Manufacturers
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Greg Reichow’s Manufacturing Process Performance Quadrants
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8D Problem Solving: Sam Bowen Describes the Power of Stopping
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Cut Costs by Getting Your Engineers in the Field
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Garrett Bastable on Building Your Own Factory
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Oracle Supply Chain Leader Mitigates Risk with Better Relationships
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Brendan Green on Working with Manufacturers
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Surviving Disaster: A Lesson in Quality from Marcy Alstott
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Ship It!
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Production Processes & Workflows
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Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Tools and Techniques
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Thinking Ahead: How to Evaluate New Technologies
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How to Buy Software (for Hardware Leaders who Usually Don’t)
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Adopting AI in the Aerospace and Defense Electronics Space
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Build vs Buy: A Guide to Implementing Smart Manufacturing Technology
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Leonel Leal on How Engineers Should Frame a Business Case for Innovation
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Saw through the Buzzwords
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Managed Cloud vs Self-Hosted Cloud vs On-Premises for Manufacturing Data
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AOI, Smart AOI, & Beyond: Keyence vs Cognex vs Instrumentalpopular
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Visual Inspection AI: AWS Lookout, Landing AI, & Instrumental
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Manual Inspection vs. AI Inspection with Instrumentalpopular
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Electronics Assembly Automation Tipping Points
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CTO of ASUS: Systems Integrators for Manufacturing Automation Don't Scale
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ROI-Driven Business Cases & Realized Value
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Webinars and Live Event Recordings
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Build Better 2024 Sessions On Demand
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Superpowers for Engineers: Leveraging AI to Accelerate NPI | Build Better 2024
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The Motorola Way, the Apple Way, and the Next Way | Build Better 2024
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The Future of Functional Test: Fast, Scalable, Simple | Build Better 2024
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Build Better 2024 Keynote | The Next Way
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Principles for a Modern Manufacturing Technology Stack for Defense | Build Better 2024
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What's Next for America's Critical Supply Chains | Build Better 2024
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Innovating in Refurbishment, Repair, and Remanufacturing | Build Better 2024
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Leading from the Front: The Missing Chapter for Hardware Executives | Build Better 2024
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The Next Way for Reducing NPI Cycles | Build Better 2024
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The State of Hardware 2025: 1,000 Engineers on Trends, Challenges, and Toolsets | Build Better 2024
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Scaling Manufacturing: How Zero-to-One Lessons Unlock New Opportunities in Existing Operations | Build Better 2024
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Design for Instrumental - Simple Design Ideas for Engineers to Get the Most from AI in NPI
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Webinar | Shining Light on the Shadow Factory
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The fourth-generation iPod Touch was my first PVT. I had joined Apple the summer before out of graduate school and had spent the last year drinking from the firehouse of CAD design, fear-tolerancing the heck out of my drawings, picking up the jargon, and traveling to China to walk the line for hours. It was a sticky August in a farm-dense suburb of Shanghai, China. And we were line down because of my part.
Apple's secrets are Apple's secrets, and I won't spill them here. While I owned several parts in the product, including the main logic board and shield cans, the speaker (the first post-consumer recycled content part Apple ever shipped!), the microphone, the gyro... But those weren't the problem part. The problem was another component that was supposed to be as simple as a component on the board and a piece of foam. Except that it wasn't. Executives had been user-testing the product, and the performance was unexpected. It was eight days before we were supposed to start ramp. When you're that far along, you've got only three fixes in your arsenal: manual glue, tape, and foam. If I worked at a different company that was more integrated, you might add "software" to that fix list. But that's it. That's all you can build a DOE of, validate, and start ramping fast enough to catch up to the rest of the BOM.
Every PVT I was ever on was fraught with a major issue (not all of them were my parts, but by the time I was leading programs, they were all my problem). At Apple, we had a rule that the design team did not get to go home until OK2Ramp, and often, we stayed behind to help our operations teammates debug replicated lines. Apple builds at such a mind-blowing scale the ramps are impressive operational marvels: hundreds of parts across hundreds of vendors going from one line making 5,000 / day to ten, thirty, or even a hundred lines making over a million a day. People might think that Apple is a quality-oriented culture, but it's actually an execution-oriented culture. Apple's manufacturing operations team comprises some of the best executors in the world. There's a reason this talent was highly coveted in the 2010s as Apple's hardware engine started spinning off highly experienced manufacturing and quality engineers and leaders.
For the operations leaders in the audience -- I know I'm not one of you, and I don't have the experiences you have. I have run Instrumental for nearly a decade and benefited from working with and alongside some of the world's most talented operations leaders. I've gotten the opportunity to see how a variety of world-class companies across multiple industries -- consumer, medical, industrial, aerospace, defense, appliances -- scale up their manufacturing and deliver for their customers. I've seen teams struggle with low first-pass yields, high returns, and recalls. I marveled at leaders who did the impossible: sailing through PVT and right into production with high yields and low return rates. I've seen large-scale line replication across many global factories, and intricate hand-building in a clean room where the "takt time" was hours. I've seen leaders leverage JDMs with great finesse, saving their organizations millions of dollars, and others completely check out only to be surprised when product returns spiked.
This chapter is dedicated to the "get it done" operators I've had the delight of learning from and working with, and is a collection of articles focusing on the how to's of actual production for electronics products.