Doug Dixon, Chief Marketing and Operations Officer, 360 BC Group, Inc.

Pandemic Recovery
While we experienced a business pause for Q1 2021, due to sporadic customer shutdowns and uncertainty about the market's future, it was only for that quarter.

Since our factory solutions provide visibility and automation, two critical aspects of remote or hybrid work, Q2 was the beginning of our rebound. Our solutions helped our customers address some of the new challenges of working remotely to better monitor, track, and control the SMT operation.

While some organizations struggled to move things to a digital platform, we were able to quickly transition previous in-person support tools to a remote infrastructure model. Today, many of our employees choose to still work remotely from home. We believe this flexibility and emphasis on work/life balance greatly contributes to the overall health of Cogiscan -- from both a business and cultural standpoint.

Inventory Shortage
We've all been impacted by the allocation issues of the past year. Fortunately, our solutions allow our customers to better cope with these shortages, by fully maximizing all assets and materials, so we were lucky to gain new customers. We also sell hardware, such as our Product Flow Controller, and while our supply chain was tested, we have been able to satisfy our customer demands.

2022 Expectations
Our industry will continue to face shortages -- in relation to components, people, and resources. In order to overcome these hurdles, and to truly thrive in this new reality, PCBA manufacturers are going to have to find ways to do more with less. Our industry is reimagining how manufacturing needs to be done, and we believe the best approach for SMT manufacturers is to optimize through digitalization and automation strategies.

Traveling in 2022
We are slowly travelling again -- we recently exhibited with iTAC Software AG at productronica and will be co-exhibiting at IPC APEX in January. Most of our customers are pleased with our remote approach, so we will continue to utilize our digital infrastructure, and keep our travel footprint minimal.