Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1038326
20 PCB007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2018 tion, and we're well underway to getting ev- erything qualified. This is our pitch—complex HDI, one to two days, full traceability, green factory. It has a lot of pluses. Matties: Tell us about finding the right skillsets for the team that you need here. Stepinski: The challenge in New Hampshire is that the population to choose from is small. Instead, we'll try to make as many positions as possible into work-at-home jobs so that we can attract people from across the country. We designed the process for the future. It won't be about running around and touching the pan- els; instead, it's about collecting and analyzing the data, then deciding what to do. Matties: As it should be in any facility. Stepinski: True. We're enabling that here and minimizing the amount of physical interaction that needs to occur beyond the automation we already have. In the future, you're not going to have people on the floor touching panels. Matties: We hear all the concern that robots are taking jobs away, and what you're saying is that the jobs are here if people want them, but they don't want these kinds of jobs, so you have to bring in automation. Stepinski: Young people grew up on comput- ers, and they don't want to give them up. We will participate in that job market and reduce the people on site down to equipment main- tenance and hands-on engineering. Honest- ly, you don't need that much hands-on engi- neering nowadays. I found you can be much more productive on complex technical tasks at home than you can while sitting at a ma- chine. When do you need to be next to the ma- chine? When there is something wrong with it, and you have to stare at it for a while— that's when you need to be at the machine. If you have all of the best equipment, though, you don't have to do that very often—you pay somebody to do that for you. Then, spend your time automating and thinking through how this connects to that, or how is this go - ing to work? How do I predict what tests I am going to run when I receive a new design? Figure 7: The GreenSource facility, located on the manufacturing campus of Whelen Engineering near Charlestown, New Hampshire.