Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1228683
APRIL 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 17 those safety controls on fire-damaged equip- ment. We spent about $7 million in new equip- ment for our circuit board shop. We ended up selecting UCE out of China because we under- stood they had the best value. That's how we came to have the first vertical continuous plat- er in North America installed in our facility. Happy said he knows of or built one earlier! Johnson: Is that installation working well? Kadah: It is. I understand UCE sold four or five more lines after we let them do a promotional video, and they brought a couple of their new prospective customers in to look at our shop. We have some robotics in the VCP that load and unload the panels. We have robotics that load and unload the conveyor lines. It's a pret- ty fancy new shop. It's 18,000 or 19,000 square feet, so it's small, but it has $7 million worth of new equipment in it. Johnson: You also do some ongoing process monitoring and adjustment. You're gathering data along the line and doing much of what we've come to expect from a smart factory. Yet, at the same time, you're not using any of the new industry protocols to implement that setup. Kadah: That's true. We didn't recognize that industry protocol. We just developed our own test equipment because fuel-fired equip- ment requires some attributes to be recorded on those circuit boards at manufacturing. We laser mark all those circuit boards for trace- ability, and then we developed the testers for them that record the timing attributes, like how long do you open a gas valve before you sense flame, how many seconds do you in- terpurge the burner before you open the gas valve, and how long it takes for you to recog- nize the flame was lost. Those are all ANSI re- quirements. We developed the test equipment in-house and then made it. Right now, I have around 150 of these testers we built ourselves. We used a Dell computer frame with a power supply. We made all the circuit boards that went in it. For the communications with those circuit boards, we interfaced with our mainframe comput- er and can now record every serialized circuit board, all the critical attributes, and so on. If there's ever an issue down the road, where that board was involved in a fire or incident, we have documented evidence to prove that it left our factory in perfect condition. That's how we have maintained our competitive edge. Even though labor costs are less outside of the United States, we have been able to sur- vive because we simply outdesign our compet- itors. We file the IP. Then, we have a competi- tive edge that has allowed us to survive when everyone else went off to Mexico, China, Viet- nam, Korea, and everywhere else, where the labor was cheap. The newly upgraded manufacturing floor in the IMS facility.