EMS@C-LEVEL
As Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and SCOOP writer, Philip Stoten, continues to talk to EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Services) executives he learns more about their individual and collective experiences and their expectations for their own businesses and for the entire electronic manufacturing industry.
EMS@C-LEVEL
Electronic 24: Compliance, Manufacturing Challenges, and Future of the PCB Industry with Vidar Olsen
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Discover the intricate world of PCB brokering with our guest, Vidar Olsen, CEO of Confidee, who shares his wealth of knowledge about the industry's evolving challenges. With Confidee's remarkable growth from one employee to a growing and skilled team of 23, Vidar highlights the urgent need for compliance and certifications like ISO 9001 and AS9120 in today’s protectionist trade environment.
Confidee is a company specializing in compliance-focused solutions within the printed circuit board (PCB) industry. Established in 2022, the firm aims to be a leader in ensuring regulatory adherence and transparency throughout the PCB supply chain. Confidee has developed a proprietary IT platform to manage, document, and verify compliance data, emphasizing supply chain integrity and the avoidance of counterfeit or non-compliant products.
As geopolitical factors reshape the landscape, we explore the hurdles Europe faces with inadequate PCB manufacturing capacity and the disparity in production costs compared to Asia. Vidar provides a candid look at the pressing need for modernization, automation, and government support to revive European PCB manufacturing and discusses the potential implications of initiatives like the US Chips Act.
Stay tuned to hear more about the policies shaping local industry investments and the innovations that promise to define PCB manufacturing in the future.
More about Confidee at https://confidee.com/
EMS@C-Level at electronica 2024 was hosted by IPC (https://www.ipc.org/)
EMS@C-Level is hosted by global inspection leaders Koh Young (https://www.kohyoung.com) and Global Electronics Association (https://www.electronics.org)
You can see video versions of all of the EMS@C-Level pods on our YouTube playlist.
Hello, I'm Philip Stoughton. I'm at Electronica 2024 on the IPC booth and I'm joined by Vidar from Confident. Great to see you again. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I think we first spoke very shortly after you started the business. Give me a very quick introduction to remind people of what you do and just give me a little bit of an insight into how things have gone. I mean, it's been what? Two years?
Speaker 2Two and a half years actually, so we started back in 2002. It was a spin-off from a previous company in Norway, so we do what is called PCB Brokering. We have a headquarter in Oslo, norway, and we have salespeople around in Europe to support our customers. Yeah, it has been a very rough start. We have gone from one employee to 23. Now we have had certifications, which is our main focus. We want to be seen upon as a professional company.
Speaker 2So we have the first year we accomplished to have the ISO 9001 and also the AS9120 for the aerospace and defense business and also the AS9120 for the aerospace and defense business, and this year we will have the ISO 27001 for the information security set in quite a technical two years, but we are looking bright in the future. Of course, we're focusing a lot on compliance work, so that's.
Speaker 1Is that compliance as a service, compliance as a consultancy, or just compliance within the supply of the previous?
Speaker 2It's compliance in the supply chain. That's what they're focusing on, and, of course, there's new regulations coming all the time, and since we are working across a lot of countries in. Europe. There are different regulations in each country. Even though countries are a part of countries in Europe. There are different relations in each country. Even though countries are a part of the EU, they have their national government rules to follow as well, which deviates a little bit from country to country. So we are there to help them to solve that problem.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think it's increasingly important and when I look at what's happening in the world politically, we seem to be moving from a very globalized trade to a much more protectionist style of trade. Again, that plays to the importance of having regulatory support, compliance support. That must be something that your customers are feeling is significantly important at the moment.
Speaker 2Yeah, it is, and I think just when we started it was kind of new still in Europe. But we see more and more requests from customers which actually want our service in that sense, and I think that what has developed for the last two or three years is, of course, as you say people want to bring the technology back to Europe. Unfortunately, there's not enough capacity in Europe, so that's another political discussion that we need to have in Europe.
Speaker 1It's interesting you say there's not enough capacity. I wonder if I started my career as a print and circuit board designer decades ago and was actually working in the PCB industry. I guess when Europe, when Europe was 20% to 25% of the world market working in the UK, when there were 280 board manufacturers there and there is a fraction of that now, so it feels like clearly there's less capacity, but way less demand.
Speaker 1We're sub 2% of the world market and there's a growing concern that there's a critical mass issue below which the survival of the industry is of a concern.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think that if you look at UK, the manufacturers there probably have a lot of business in telecommunication and industrial products and then they everybody moved out to especially China or Asia. So all the factors in Europe was forced to close down the larger factories and keep the small for high tech, but now we would like to have those larger factories back.
Speaker 2Big customers are asking for large demand in Europe, which is not enough. There's not enough capacity at the moment, so I think that will still be a struggle for many years Are they prepared to pay for? That. That's another question. I think one thing is Europe, but we also have the demand for outside China, and if you look at Thailand or Malaysia, it's still a significant price difference.
Speaker 2And customers want to, they say that okay, they will accept, maybe for the couple of first years, but I think it's still the logistics, the supply chain or the raw materials is still in China, Even though they're starting to move out it will still be a price difference. I think a lot of customers are asking for it to have an option outside China, but we don't really see that they are starting to move the business yet. But I think that will be a good way to be some intermediate between moving all back to Europe.
Speaker 2We have a supply from South Asia.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think it's kind of a demand-led process, as you say. So if we can establish demand in Europe, made in Europe, for inter-circuit boards, we can perhaps look at expanding the capacity. But for that expanded capacity to be competitive, it has to be very modern, it has to be very heavily automated. We have to take as much labor out as possible. Is that something you see the board manufacturers here taking on board and able to do? I think part of it is them looking for protection themselves from government. Is that a solution?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think it's a mix of both. I think we see in Europe as well, people are working a lot with automation. They're also working a lot to streamline the production process. It's like they are using consultancies to actually optimize the process flow in their factories. So I think that's naturally happened the last five to ten years. So we see that there's a lot more automation also in Europe. Even though the quantities are smaller and there's typically a small series and they have to change quickly, that means the setup needs to be quick as well. But again, I think that all the PCB industry needs some incentives from the governments that they want to focus on Europe.
Speaker 2So you have the Chips Act in the US and they are also focusing a lot on the PCB industry. So I think that it's necessary for that to happen in Europe, as well to also want people to invest in PCB factories in Europe.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think the difference is in Europe you don't have a president that can sign an executive act on his first day of being in power.
Speaker 1You have 28 states that have got to agree and get that process moving forward, but I think there's a desire and an incentive to do it. When you talk about automation, I think that's really interesting. Part of that automation process is the digital transformation of the supply chain itself. Do you look at a lot of software automation in what you do, and are you using AI there to bring it together? We are using just AI.
Speaker 2internally we are working a lot with automation, because we are not board manufacturers, so we are just facilitating the deal. So we are working a lot with automating the engineering queries. So we want to build the portal as transparent as possible between the manufacturer and the customer so they can actually see what's happening with their boards and also with their data, which is easily protected, so they can at any given time see who has had access to their data. That's a kind of a good way to also solve some of the challenges with sending emails back and forth, transferring files, which is also a critical point on the PCV data.
Speaker 1Yeah, and being able to interrogate those emails and PDFs or whatever and create something that is a universally acceptable file.
Speaker 2Yeah, which is something I've been working on for many years. Hopefully they will succeed, but it will probably take some more time. Again, like any government, it's a slow-moving machine.
Speaker 1Commercially, we'd all like things to move a bit quicker, particularly in such a competitive environment. When I look at brokering but I look at brokering the way it's been converted to marketplace by companies like Fictive Xometry and the 3D space and the CNC space A lot of that is that uploading data, design for manufacturing, checks on the fly, getting stuff ready really quickly. Do you see that as critical, particularly at small volumes?
Speaker 2Yeah, of course it is. I think our concern is actually that you need to control who has access to the data where do you store the data, which is now common in the cloud policies? So I think that's the main concern by using cloud-based services. So that needs to be protected and to be controlled in the software.
Speaker 1That's why we wanted to go for the ISO 27001 certification yeah, and that's why I think your ethos of the business, which is compliance which is regulatory which is very process-driven and very secure is really important to people right now.
Speaker 2So I think there's a real validity to that business and it's not only for defense and airspace, but obviously all industries actually have the same demand telecommunication for medical for most of the critical industrial products as well, like all from metering to actually or like infosystem in cars, but there's a lot of data which you can extract from that and can be used in a not really good way, yeah no, absolutely, and it brings the model of brokering forward from the old days when it was just someone in a car with a telephone driving around buying and selling circuit boards for a margin.
Speaker 1So I think what's important when you are a middleman in any process is explaining to the market where you're adding additional value, where there is real insight provided, real additional data, additional protections additional compliance, and that's what we're trying to achieve with our portal.
Speaker 2We want to be as transparent as possible. We want to be that thin layer between, but still show what we are actually adding as a value to the customer. So again, I know that there's a lot of people talking about transparency, but that's the whole idea why we started Confidic it's actually to be the transparent partner between the customers.
Gratitude and Future Collaboration
Speaker 1Yeah, I think it's important. Vidal, thanks so much for your time. Thank you for having me Enjoy the rest of the show. It's been a real pleasure. I like what you're doing. Let's talk about it again soon. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you.