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52 SMT Magazine • April 2016 There is always a risk of being everything to everybody, which usually leads to being noth- ing to anybody. There is also a concern that by gearing up the factory to satisfy the most de- manding customers, such as the automotive sector, expensive solutions go unappreciated by the less demanding clients. But what if we could look at this strategy in a different light? Are there best manufacturing practices valued by a wide variety of industry segments that also reduce production costs? Before the 2008 industry downturn, the company implemented a Lean manufacturing practice to run its operation more efficiently at a lower cost. This was a company-wide initia- tive that proved hugely beneficial over time. Let's drill down to a specific process and analyze how the company operates. President John Siemens III states that be- cause the pick-and-place machines do a great job, the company focuses more on the reflow and screen printing processes where there is room for improvement. Kelli Lubenkov, opera- tional excellence manager at the company, be- lieves that the RoHS thermal process is critical due to the narrow process window brought on by the heat tolerances of some of the compo- nents. The company has established the prac- tice of profiling every new, unique PCB assem- bly before starting production. Additionally, previously run PCB assemblies are profiled after production line changeover to verify that the oven is ready to process the assembly in spec. This is an expensive practice because it leads to additional production downtime as well as an extra labor cost associated with technicians per- forming such a time-consuming manual task numerous times daily. EMS companies in North America tend to produce a large variety of assemblies in a high- mix/low-to medium-volume production envi- ronment. Siemens is no different, with up to Figure 1: Siemens Manufacturing Co. Inc.'s client industry composition. bEnEfiTs of imProvinG rEfloW and scrEEn PrinTinG ProcEssEs