Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1284035
52 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2020 can come to such a screeching stop. And that meant that our people, and everybody else involved in all of this, were not traveling as they had been before. Suddenly, we're trying to handle all these from a remote situation. And we noticed the challenges that maybe we didn't notice before because we weren't forced to work through so many limitations in being able to provide the support that we needed to provide. We typically have our help desk, and people work on a dedicated basis to handle all of those tickets and the support that's needed. But as a matter of handling a lot of these needs through this situation, we've had a lot of our field service engineers that typically would have been at customer sites, working as dedicated remote support for the various needs of our customers. Of course, there are some situations where we evaluated the cir- cumstances and determined that the only, ade- quately timely, and the best solution was going to be to have somebody go on-site. We made sure that everybody on our side of the issue was good with that, and that the customer was good with it, and addressed the particular con- cerns that needed to be addressed in each sit- uation. And those people went on-site and took care of those situa- tions. But it's amazing how, when you need to, you can find ways to work around those things that you took for granted before and find other solutions to accom- plish the same thing. Fortu- nately, we had a lot of the tools in place to help us do that rather painlessly, con- sidering the circumstances. Johnson: When I worked in manufacturing equipment service, there were things that you could rely on the customer-located techni- cal support people to per- form on a machine. There were things that required a field support technician from the factory out to resolve. Are you finding that you're still able to deliver on both types of required service? Armstrong: Yes, to a very large degree. It's quite encouraging to see how much of what needed to be done could be accomplished through these alternative means that we have been uti- lizing in this situation. Earlier, I mentioned that it also depended on the customer situation. Did they already have Koh Young equipment? Did they already have certain familiarity and exper- tise with the equipment, or were they totally new? In the cases where it was possibly a totally new customer getting their first machines, even the customer decided they would just like to wait and see how the situation unfolded, to determine the appropriate time to go and do what was needed, on-site. And the way things unfolded, except for a couple of situations, it was possible to postpone some things until the situation was alleviated a bit so that it was more feasible to get somebody on-site without going through so many hoops. It all depended a little bit on both the experience of the customer with SPI or AOI in general, as well as with their expe- rience with Koh Young equipment. All of that came into play as well. Zenith 3D AOI machine.