Craig Stamer Vice President, General Manager, Quadrangle Products

Adapting well in the face of adversity

We've all had to adapt to new working methods over the past year. XJTAG introduced free hands-on webinars to demonstrate how JTAG can be used to check populated boards for solder shorts and open-circuits. This took the webinar concept to a new level by providing an interactive environment in which attendees have remote access to PCs running XJTAG software connected to boards being tested. No longer was it the traditional one-sided presentation.

XJTAG started this approach to help keep employees safe from COVID-19 by avoiding face-to-face workshops, but we quickly realised its longer-term potential: we could provide a classroom style hands-on experience without travel's environmental impact. It forced a rethink of how we had previously worked and made us consider how to do business post-COVID.

We found these webinars brought us more potential clients than previously: although some employers considered engineers' time too valuable to allow them to travel to workshops, they did permit webinar attendance--the number of participants rocketed.

COVID-19 demonstrated that technology can remove the need for travel, and we expect 2021 levels to be lower than pre-COVID. While the pandemic brought tragedies, it also taught industry how to be more efficient and edge closer to carbon-neutrality.