Webinars

Everyday roadblocks can make it hard enough to manufacture your products on time. Yet if you have to redesign a PCBA due to cost-saving considerations or component issues, you can really get behind.

Start maximizing your PCBA design efficiency by attending this 30-minute webinar, where you will learn how to improve your PCBA design process by reducing time waste, controlling costs, and avoiding counterfeit components that can derail your entire process.

We’ll discuss:

• Techniques for managing costs while maintaining quality
• Optimizing PCBA layout to reduce time waste
• How counterfeit components hinder your success and how to avoid them.

This webinar is a valuable opportunity for electronics engineers and designers to gain insights and ask questions from industry experts.

Lunar New Year celebrations begin on January 22, 2023. Globally, this is the largest annual human migration event on the planet, and with it begins a long stretch of electronics manufacturing disruption across Asian nations.

Because electronic components are sourced worldwide, this event has an impact on manufacturing everywhere. Be prepared for disruptions to your manufacturing process regardless of where you manufacture by understanding how closures may change sourcing, logistics, and capacity around the globe.

This webinar will touch on many important topics including:

1. What Lunar New Year is, its significance, and its effects
2. Discussion of the direct effects on Asian manufacturing and the indirect effects on manufacturing production worldwide
3. How to prepare for this event and what you should do now to minimize its impact through proactive manufacturing resilience planning

Your electronics development team works hard, but external pressures and operational demands leave you worn out and wondering what tomorrow will bring. This webinar will share factors within your control that will help you avoid problems that can derail your project before it even begins.

We will cover:

1. How your product lifecycle commitment affects delivery timelines
2. Creative ways to expand your BoM
3. Data integration for better budgeting in today’s shifting environment
4. Goal sharing (or, bringing your team together)

Ongoing shipping and production challenges with traditional Asian partners have led many electronics companies to reconsider American-based prototyping. If you’re thinking of using a US-based partner for your next project, what should you be aware of before you make the move?

This webinar will discuss:

1. Current factors affecting manufacturing locally and abroad
2. How to identify risks before moving existing PCBA designs from longstanding manufacturers, and how to maintain design integrity in your next iteration.
3. Advantages of US-based prototyping in today’s unstable market related to cost, quality, and delivery.

Traditional electronics manufacturing partitions data within independent information silos, impacting order processes and limiting data insights that could drive improvement. But electronics cloud manufacturing provides a data-centric environment that can break down walls between your teams and enhance overall company performance. This webinar will:

1. Identify common asset and labor bottlenecks that can impede company productivity
2. Explore strategies to reduce costs, speed up throughput, and make better use of resources
3. Map and develop key goals that can help you build business flexibility and resilience

Increasing development speed and cutting your time to market can substantially increase your product’s competitive advantage. Join us as we discuss different ways to facilitate efficient design processes. Discussion topics include:

1. Designing team roles to maintain communication and break down silos
2. Developing good documentation practices and how they impact data integrity
3. Exploring steps you can take to avoid design rework and production delays

Increasing demand for competitive efficiency has moved today’s inventory control systems beyond simple automated tasks. Join us for our webinar where we will discuss:

1. The impact of recent supply chain issues on inventory management
2. Inventory management system optimization using better datasets
3. How cloud manufacturing data and after-build services can restore inventory balance

Not all supply chain problems can be attributed to COVID-19. Your customer experience relies heavily on accurately predicting risk and making decisions to avoid it. This webinar will discuss:

1. Regular issues causing supply chain disruptions (weather, geopolitical, changes in demand).
2. Risks associated with supply chain disruptions (poor customer experience, missing deadlines, operational disruptions, insufficient forecasting, counterfeit parts).
3. Tools and strategies to predict risk and improve decisions

Nearly every Bill of Materials has one or more line items that are single-sourced: only one component from one manufacturer is allowed. Single-sourcing materials is the most common cause of unavailability, and therefore, delayed or halted production.

Join us as we discuss the importance of Designing for Availability: rules and strategies for design engineers to support continued manufacturing in times of ever-increasing supply chain delays.

You will learn:

1. The importance of having multiple vendors for every critical material in your design
2. Strategies for diversifying and reacting to changing market conditions
3. Modular design approaches
4. Software-designed features
5. Single-sourcing approval processes
6. Using digital platforms to inform sourcing decisions during design

When your product is held up waiting on a single component, it's common to go to brokers and other secondary sources to find enough materials to unblock your product. For some manufacturers, this is something to be avoided at all costs, and for others , it's an every-day activity. How do you determine if you should include independent suppliers in your sourcing strategy?

Join us as we discuss the differences in Independent Distributors, Brokers, and Secondary Source markets. We'll cover how each operates, where they source their materials, the impact it can have on your sourcing strategy, and how risks are mitigated in non-authorized component markets.

What you will learn:

1. Who independent distributors are, and their role in the components marketplace
2. The risks associated with materials acquired through independent channels
3. Common tools and strategies to minimize risk when buying materials from independent sources

Every day, we hear bad news about the supply chain for electronics materials and components. The supply chain is not a static system however, and while some new issues may appear, others can improve.

Join us to receive an up-to-date view on the overall electronics component and materials supply chain, which vendors are improving their outcomes, which ones are having greater market pressures, and an up-to-date view of the next six months.

What you will learn:

1. Current status of the electronics supply chain: which materials are facing new supply pressures, which are improving, and which remain challenges
2. How manufacturers and vendors are reacting to the supply chain challenges and what can we expect to see coming in the next few months
3. Projections for material availability and pricing for the near-term

Designing and validating a new product prototype is just the beginning of every journey. Effectively managing the transition from prototype to production for printed circuit board assemblies can stress even the most mature processes.

Join MacroFab for a product demonstration on how to effectively manage prototype production, version and track changes, transition designs from engineering to purchasing teams, and manage purchasing through the MacroFab platform.

What you will learn:

1. How to use the MacroFab platform to price and order prototype designs
2. Versioning, change tracking, and locking down production designs
3. Managing the purchasing workflow between engineering and manufacturing teams in the MacroFab platform

Every product starts at prototyping, but not every product makes it past that that stage. Getting your new design to production as quickly as possible reduces risk and accelerates revenue. Digital manufacturing tools and platforms enable product teams to design, test, iterate, and solve production challenges faster than ever before. Join design and manufacturing experts from Altium, MacroFab, and Xometry to learn how to accelerate your new products from idea to customer and capture market value away from companies using traditional tools and methodologies.

What you will learn:

1. The current state of digital manufacturing, platforms, tools, and capabilities
2. Leveraging digital manufacturing and design tools to accelerate prototyping
3. Utilizing digital manufacturing platforms to solve prototype to production transition challenges

Digital manufacturing platforms today have a wide range of capabilities at every stage of production. Bringing a product to market used to be a slow, manual process. But in the last five years, businesses have been able to accelerate product design, prototype development, NPI process, and high-volume production using digital manufacturing platforms to gain access to thousands of electronics assembly factories, machine shops, and plastics fabrication facilities.

Join design and manufacturing experts from Altium, MacroFab, and Xometry to learn how building a digital thread from design stages to production at scale allows you to eliminate delays caused by the supply chain crisis and build products faster using cloud technologies.

What will you learn:

1. What is the current state of digital manufacturing? What kind of products can be built using these platforms, and what production scale can you reach?
2. What range of processes do these platforms enable? Can you really build fully assembled products, tested and packaged products using digital manufacturing platforms?
3. Why integration between design tools and digital manufacturing platforms enables faster product development, with significantly reduced errors and better visibility.
4. What will digital manufacturing platforms enable me to do in the future? What exactly is Industry 4.0, and does it matter?

What will you learn:

1. What is the current state of digital manufacturing? What kind of products can be built using these platforms, and what production scale can you reach?
2. What range of processes do these platforms enable? Can you really build fully assembled products, tested and packaged products using digital manufacturing platforms?
3. Why integration between design tools and digital manufacturing platforms enables faster product development, with significantly reduced errors and better visibility.
4. What will digital manufacturing platforms enable me to do in the future? What exactly is Industry 4.0, and does it matter?

A successful PCB project isn’t just about creating a schematic and turning it into a great looking layout. Your PCB design project doesn’t end until you receive your board back in its physical form and ensure it has high yield, falls within budget, fits within its enclosure properly and it performs as intended.

That is a lot to get right! The good news?

There are steps you can take to ensure that your PCB will translate seamlessly from a digital design to the physical world of manufacturing. This webinar, hosted in partnership with MacroFab, will focus on best practices and CAD features that can help you design and produce manufacturable boards, eliminate the need for multiple board re-spins and reduce time spent on unnecessary design iterations.

We’ll cover: 1. Tips and tricks for designing and producing manufacturable boards 2. How to virtually test how your PCB design will assemble into its enclosure 3. How to snap component positions to match existing geometry in your enclosure 4. How to quickly and easily create accurate 3D models and footprints for your electronics components using Fusion 360’s built-in 3D Package Generator 5. How you can leverage MacroFab to manufacture your PCB designs directly from your final Fusion 360 board layout