This week, the Global Electronics Association published its monthly report on PCB fabrication and EMS bookings and shipments, and the numbers are extremely positive. In EMS, the three-month book-to-bill ratio stands at 1.29 for July. Year-to-date EMS bookings are at 11% over 2025. The picture is similar in PCB fabrication as well. Year-to-date bookings are up 33% over last year, and book-to-bill stands at 1.46.

Quality has often been viewed as the final checkpoint before a product is shipped to a customer. Manufacturing organizations invest heavily in inspection teams whose responsibility is to identify defects before they escape into the marketplace. While that approach has served our industry reasonably well for many years, today's manufacturing environment demands something fundamentally different.

At the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the U.S. men’s 4x100-meter relay team of Trayvon Bromell, Fred Kerley, Ronnie Baker, and Cravon Gillespie was expected to contend for gold. With some of the fastest sprinters in the world, simply reaching the final seemed almost certain. Instead, the heavily favored team finished sixth in its qualifying heat and failed to advance, missing the final by just two-hundredths of a second. This massive disappointment was not due to a lack of individual speed but to a poorly executed baton exchange between Kerley and Baker, which forced both runners to slow down at the most critical moment.