The High-speed High-mix Production Environment Emerges

摘要

The North American printed circuit board (PCB) assembly market has undergone dramatic changes since the early 1990s that have reshaped the way PCB manufacturers regard the design of their production environments. In the early part of the decade, the market consisted of two basic segments, roughly of equal proportion: OEMs, who built their own finished products, and contract manufacturers (CM), who performed that function for OEMs on a project basis. However, product lifecycles and development times then underwent a contraction while manufacturers in all markets focused on defining and limiting operations to "core competencies." As a result, the capital investment required to acquire and maintain state-of-the-art production lines became a less attractive prospect to large enterprises in the computer, telecommunications and other digitally-driven industries. Rather, their response was to allocate a greater percentage of internal resources toward research, design and product innovation; manufacturing per se was outsourced increasingly to the CMs.