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JANUARY 2022 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 43 gram or how high for a drill stack, there's the chance of making a wrong decision. Matties: What are you doing to offset or cor- rect that? Stevenson: We are concentrating on soware- type solutions—taking the choice out of the process and creating a more repeatable and quality output. As long as they follow what the soware has documented, there should be less opportunity for a wrong decision. Matties: e big challenge is how to come in and fully automate the system like that. How can it be done? How much scrap or frustration do you experience before you just decide to do it? Stevenson: Right, but with automation, you can build a whole lot of scrap pretty quickly if you do not have the right checks in place to identi- fy that the process has deviated from the norm. Engineering controls that keep an eye on the process in real time is another very important piece with the automation. Matties: You still need to have your rules in check. Stevenson: Exactly. We take out the human error and put the main things on the mainte- nance staff to make sure the PMs and SPC are done. Johnson: Can you see automatic board han- dling solutions on the way? Stevenson: ey make a lot of sense, but with our constraints in the building—and every square foot is valuable real estate—it is tough to just add equipment. It must be strategical- ly done so as to not leave out something that's needed. We're seeing we need to have a larger footprint on a deburr machine for better rins- ing and better scrubbing. Everything is getting bigger, especially if you put automation at the ends of them now. Johnson: Do you see changes in customer quote behavior? What seems to be the customer pri- orities? Stevenson: eir priorities are price, delivery, quality, and reputation. Atay: And now parts. Stevenson: Because of our business methods, I think it's just more an effect of the internet model, in that there are so many competitors on the internet now. ey're not being proac- tive and pricing up parts before they design. e thinking seems to be, "I'm going to design this part, and then I'm going to figure out how to get it made." Atay: ey're not designing to a fabricator and they're not going to find who has the best. Stevenson: Everybody probably has an internal algorithm for what's most important to them Dawn DelCastillo