It should be of no surprise that global telecom Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) are now in high demand. Television and the Internet connect us all – people, machines and companies worldwide – based on smart electronic and telecom products. Consumers’ choices continue to redefine the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry in terms of safer, more accessible and faster methods of communication.
Read the interview with our CEO, Bartosz Kajut and our General Manager, Włodzimierz Babś where they share the story of VECTOR BLUE HUB and explain the unique concept of keeping design and manufacturing services under one roof.
The Industry 4.0 revolution redefines the way people, machines, and companies connect worldwide. Our awareness grows simultaneously with our desire to harness the Internet of Things (IoT) to facilitate data collection, such as by medical devices, wearables running on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or smart devices using Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. Here a challenge arises for electronic manufacturing companies, as they need to replace the traditional circuit board with a flexible printed one (PCB).
The pandemic has irrevocably changed the role of supply chain management (SCM) in manufacturing electronic devices. The coronavirus outbreak has exposed all weaknesses of the supply chain in maintaining production continuity and providing component availability. Many companies pursued a business continuity plan to reduce the risk of not keeping to agreed lead-times, but some contract manufacturers were too late to act.
The ability to respond with services that deliver real value to the customer and invest their money wisely is today the most important aspect of Electronic Manufacturing Services. Keeping electronic design and manufacturing under one roof represents the smart approach, one where the customer benefits by being served better, faster and more cost-effectively.
The road to bringing the final electronic products to the mass market can be bumpy and fraught with difficulties. Everything starts with the custom electronics design, where we identify the requirements and establish a set of technological standards such as communication protocols.
Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) companies need to make smart decisions that bring real value to the customer, whether in product design, prototyping, or contract manufacturing. With operational excellence, they can achieve the highest levels of agility by doing things better, faster, and more flexibly.
The telco electronics sector is one of the most dynamically growing industries to have made major investments in broadband and internet services in recent years. The need for high capacity has been increasing steadily for years and the COVID-19 epidemic has accelerated global digitization. It is estimated that humankind “leapfrogged” some ten years forward over the past six months.
Product development spending can be a major item in many company budgets. Global manufacturers of electronic devices often have the means to initiate many projects and run them simultaneously, to eventually continue only those that have prospects to do well in the market. Can such an approach continue?
Sketching ideas is one of the first steps that you have to take when designing a product. Of course, it doesn’t just need to be used in a professional design process; this approach is well worth using in the visual presentation and development of any idea. The advantage of sketching is that you don’t have to be a trained artist to create sketches. With them, design concepts can be presented and explained easily.
You’ve got an idea for a new electronic product or even more: you’ve got a complete design for your solution and all you need to launch the product is a reliable partner who will turn your vision into a physical product. There are plenty of companies which provide such services and you are surely wondering what criteria you need to choose the best partner to work with.
A device designed by VECTOR BLUE HUB, an IP-RF signal modulator, marketed as ROTON, has been recognized by the Polish Institute of Industrial Design as one of the most innovative Polish design solutions presented at the exhibition of 25 Polish Design Process Success Stories.
Beacons are one of the examples of how we have transferred the well-known Bluetooth technology from everyday use to the business environment. We could expand their application on a bigger, more usable scale if the location services Bluetooth were more accurate. As it happens, it is already viable (you can track objects down to centimeters), but it needs more sophisticated technology - the technology which takes its beginning in the first steps of designing beacons hardware.
Recently, we went through the subject of working along with the process in companies. It is very wise of an entrepreneur to set the work in procedures (we know that now), but is it wise from the client's perspective to track down paragraphs? Let us keep an eye on what information clients get when they know their services provider sticks to process stages.
What does it mean that an organization's tasks flow down in a well-thought-through process right to their completion? Is it still a hard-and-fast fossilized thing of the past - a management dodo? Or sort of a business prism which casts the full picture of where the organization goes? Then it is nothing like a fossil but a map. And, putting the first steps in the unknown business endeavor, you would incline to join rather the man with a map than the one without it... In the electronic devices industry, the process - the perfect map - takes three features which will make it not inflexible, but agile.
Compaction of the components constituting electronic devices advances owing to the demand for the comfort of life and work, and also for sparing time. Devices have to be smaller, faster, more accessible and friendlier in terms of user experience. To be sure they will keep working for years we need to look them through – literally. X-ray inspection of the BGA soldering or joints on PCBs finds the smallest defections whose diameter may take no more than one micrometer… The accuracy of its quality control is, thus, spectacular. Is spectacular in this case becoming a standard? And why X-raying electronics saves money?
You stepped into the last stages of your project and already designed signal generators, so you are making yourself ready to send terabytes of data to the end users. Or, let us step backward, you want to distribute your new cutting-edge optical fibers but… with few favorable odds that you are going to connect them with coaxial RF connectors. Indeed, excitement dwindles much when we find ourselves in a system of the legacy infrastructure – old and dusty domestic wires long forgotten. It occurs, however, that there is a way out of such a technological despair with one simple move – even if your project has already arrived on an advanced stage.
After a few years of European electronics manufacturing services (EMS) market stagnation there has come the time for the rebirth. The European EMS industry will have reached 32 billion euro by 2021 as the Reed Electronics Research's report says. ADAMCIT (Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Medical, Control & Industrial and Telecom) sectors in this area will soon be getting bigger and bigger at a compound annual rate of 2.8% on average. Those promising numbers reveal the answers to the questions like: “Why to produce electronic devices and components in Europe?” And the fact that more companies follow those on the winning streak does not provide any answer.
Project in electronic devices industry, if successful, comes from what the client wants and what the market expects. Between them springs up quality – the bridge between a company and its clients. Quality planning is then answering the question how to deliver what is in demand. But why does it take so much to plan this very process, especially in manufacturing electronic devices, and when to call quality enough?
Working as a Scrum Master comes very close to conducting a symphonic orchestra– it only seems like light and frivolous brandishing the baton. In fact, these merry swings only veneer an arduous endeavor followed by tons of knowledge and multitasking – do not look away from the harp, keep an eye on the piano, what are the strings doing?! It is, thus, enough for one person to conduct the development team, but what happens before one sits on the Scrum Master’s chair?
All you need to know about Scrum is that you plan, do, revise, repeat... Simple, is it not? Three roles in the management and five steps in task tackling - repeat. Repeat until you deliver the ultimate value to your client. It is so concise that even the Scrum Guide itself takes roughly two pages of the offhand writing. And yet, that apparent step-by-step simplicity still brings on too many perplexities to leave it undiscussed. Where, thus, lie pains of Scrum implementation and how to achieve quick wins in it?
Agility of projects in great portion depends on planning, short proceedings and updating the status with a huge space for people’s initiative who are engaged in work. But how to harness this revolutionizing freedom to steer where in fact we want to go with our project? Is Product Owner’s role an answer for communicational struggles in agile management? Why is it essential to have such a person in the company ranks?
New technologies have changed our lives. They have. In many cases, they made them easier, more convenient and faster. Of all these things they will never forgive sluggishness, especially when you work in the connectivity industry. Once, a group of sharp minds converged and said enough to the inanity of corporate rusty administration machines hidden deep in companies’ corridors. That’s how agile was born – a mindset which assumes one thing: to act. And we tested some quick methods on how to do it.
Telco operators face many challenges these days. Their biggest nightmare is being unable to provide customers with high-speed services due to existing infrastructure. This case study outlines how we helped multiple-system operators solve this problem.
