Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1284035
SEPTEMBER 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 31 apply. I have written a number of engineer- ing requirement documents that are all click- able through that SharePoint link. My users will open up that desktop link, and it presents them what looks like a website with clickable links that bring any of the documents to the user's desktop, and the nice thing is these are evergreen; the documents they open are never out of date. No matter what part of the design they're in, they can just click to open the documents that we've written, collected, and linked that way. I've put it out at their fingertips because there is a ton of information, and that has been working out pretty well. Johnson: Do you find that you're getting traction? Steiner: Absolutely. With the number of questions that were coming up—and even worse than that, when the questions didn't get asked, or schematics start coming out looking like they're from a couple of dif- ferent companies—having a set of easily referenced guide- lines keeps us all headed in the same direction. Board layouts are evolv- ing the same way with design consistency. Our schematics look the same, and our board layouts have the same good techniques embedded. Johnson: To what extent are these guidelines driven by your supply chain or your manufac- turing chain? Do you have a captive facility there that you are using? Steiner: Our captive facilities are at the box build level. All of our electronic manufacturing is outsourced to EMS partners, and we house some of our EMS partners right in our build- ings in some locations. It's nice that we can push over the requirements, go over and par- ticipate or just be readily available to make sure everything looks good. That's working out great for us. Johnson: Some of these partners are "captive- like" in that they're as close as if they were just a department for you. Steiner: That's true because the lines that they run within our facility are only going to be for CASCO or Amphenol products. Johnson: How close is that collaboration between manufacturing—your EMS partners—and what ends up in your design guidelines. Steiner: The thing that you would need to know is what capabilities this supplier has, do they have everything that we need and are those operations some- thing that we can go audit and approve? And so that's what we did. I joined Amphenol in 2018 in the spring, and I've already gone to five of our board fab- ricators in China and three of our EMS operations. By learn- ing what the possibilities are and understanding what the equipment is, we write some of our design guidelines based on what our suppliers could do specifically. Johnson: It becomes a working relationship to make sure that you have the guidelines set up for what the machinery and the skills and the techniques are with your manufacturing? Steiner: Right. Our sourcing group does what sourcing groups do, and they're out looking for opportunities all the time. When we find an advantage, such as a lead time or improved PPM, those need to be reined in and contained. Our engineering group must approve any of the fabricators that are used. Johnson: With this work to put together guide- lines, etc., what metrics do you track through the product life cycle? How do you calculate ROI? Steiner: It's hard to directly measure the return on the efforts of engineering to follow estab-