Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1111672
MAY 2019 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 29 rial and manufacturing readiness requirements within the DoD. We want to be involved early on a program to ensure that there's financing allocated in the DoD budget; we don't want to neces- sarily engage in one-off R&D or science experiments. We will, on occasion, for the right customer or long-term opportunities. But typ- ically, we prefer involvement in the whole life cycle. Johnson: What does a perfect pro- gram look like for Zentech, and what makes for a well-prepared customer? Vaughan: Well-organized pro- grams that allow sufficient lead time to procure the components work well for us. Again, having a technical point of con- tact readily available for dialogue is important because there will be questions. I've been at this almost 40 years, and I've yet to see the per- fect package where we could release it to our supply chain and the Gerbers and BOM were straightforward and perfect. It just doesn't happen that way. If you're looking for success, the customer has to participate. Another key would be to share your pricing with us. A lot of our clients are large, and on an annual basis, they're negotiating specific pricing tiers with their distribution partners and even direct with some of the manufactur- ers. It wastes time for everybody if you don't share that information because even though we're a large spend in our market in the Pen- tagon Region—probably the largest compo- nent spend—but we're not in the magnitude of some of the larger military clients' combined spends. The more they can share that regis- tered pricing with us in the beginning, the bet- ter our overall materials cost is going to be as well as their ultimate cost. Johnson: Do you have a success story about a relationship with a customer that you can share? Vaughan: Yes, lots of them. We work on chal- lenging stuff, and somehow through all the twists and turns that are inevitable with high- complexity military electronics manufacturing, we manage to produce great outcomes through our teamwork and finely developed processes. We also have a lot of depth. There are certainly larger electronics contract manufacturers than Zentech, but we pride ourselves on having an OEM mindset and a very deep bench across all key disciplines. We're heavily staffed on the front end with engineering capability. Our CEO was previously VP of product devel- opment and operations for an OEM corpora- tion with a couple of billion dollars in reve- nue each year. When he came to Zentech over a decade ago, he was able to draw some tal- ent from his former company over to our side. We have a lot of engineers on the front end that most organizations of our size don't have. And on the back end—for test development, methodologies, testing for fixture construction, and engineering talent that can troubleshoot to the component level—we are also very deep in those areas. We bring engineering solutions to everything that we do. We had a customer in the heads-up display (HUD) environment supporting a military plat-