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October 2015 • The PCB Magazine 79 CyCLE TIME REDUCTION FOR DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CUSTOMERS field group. That's really what we base our whole business on. If we can do it well, together we'll be much stronger than any one of us would have been individually. We have a lot of respect for these businesses today; they have technolo- gies in their innovation group where they're patented and we can't go near them. Likewise, with some MacDermid products. The thought is that we could combine some of these technolo- gies and make an even better third product, for instance. That's what's exciting to the innova- tion guys. Cullen: From the perspective of our innovation team, for example, we need to draw on the ex- perience from our people. It's a great experience, but it's not all the experience in the industry. Once we bring in other really great innovators from OM and Alent, it builds on all those ex- periences to deliver a better product faster and with higher yield for our customers. The same could be said for the service people. Service is all about experience. If you have more people with a broader breadth of experiences, it's going to be a much better experience for the customer at the end of the day. Kenney: On the service side, experience is one piece, and the other side that we struggle with all the time is speed. Getting our service solutions quickly to a customer is super important. Now that you combine all three of these groups to- gether, we will virtually have someone in every customer's backyard. None of us had that indi- vidually. No one has a person in every custom- er's backyard, but together we just might. We talked about experience being very important to success, but speed and cycle time reduction is equally important, which means these fabri- cators really rely on us to be there to help them with the job that's due tomorrow. We're going to be able to get to places faster than we ever could have in the past. That's exciting for us as well. Matties: When you talk cycle time reduction, is it more about the service and not necessarily the process? Kenney: I worked at a PC fabricator for a long time. Back then, it wasn't always about one-day, two-day, three-day turns, but whenever you run into an issue, whether it's chemical-, mechani- cal-, or process-related, that creates some kind of a lag in your production delivery. Now, if there's basically an engineer from a supplier, who is on-site the same day within a few hours, we can take that eight- or nine-hour delay to maybe two hours. This is how we will continue to grow our value. The value proposition we bring to an owner is, "Now we're in your backyard, so when there is a process problem, what you want is a suppli- er who's knowledgeable, with the experience, and who can get there the quickest." We're going to get them back up and running with that prototype job today, not the day after to- morrow. For them, that's real money. We have customers that tell us all the time, "If I don't ship on time, there's either a huge discount or we ship it for free." That's their pledge to their customer base, so how important is it to have a supplier that understands that, and takes part in that process? That's another way we bring value to our customers. Matties: That's interesting, because there was a point where a lot of the American suppliers really just left America and joined the race to China. FeATure inTervieW macDermid headquarters in Waterbury, cT uSa .