RM 185: How Accuracy & Force Compliance Contribute to Better Quality & Reliability, with Michael Sivigny

In electronics manufacturing, defects don’t usually announce themselves. They happen in milliseconds, far faster than human perception, and often long before anyone realizes a process has drifted out of control. By the time failures show up in test, inspection, or worse, in the field, the root cause may be buried deep inside machine behavior that no one thought to question. When machines are assumed to be accurate instead of proven to be accurate, and when force is set but not verified, hidden variation creeps in. That variation can translate directly into cracked components, misalignment, latent damage, and long-term reliability risk. Michael Sivigny is SMT productivity & profit strategist and owner and general manager CeTaQ Americas, a company that has spent decades doing what most factories don’t, objectively measuring machine performance under real production conditions.  Sivigny's work has repeatedly shown that even well-maintained, recently serviced equipment can operate outside of specification, quietly generating defects at high speed. In this conversation, we’ll dig into how accuracy validation and force measurement expose problems traditional troubleshooting misses, why OEM calibration alone is no longer enough for today’s miniaturized electronics, and how statistically sound measurement practices improve not only yield and uptime, but long-term product reliability. If you believe reliability starts long before functional test, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.