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MAY 2019 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 87 it, but other times, it's completely out of your control. Of course, the big question is how do you respond when mistakes occur? Sprizza: Exactly. Hamlett: One of the bigger success stories at this production facility was a customer years ago that had government jobs, had financial trouble, and CMs were throwing them out left and right and couldn't deal with them any- more. We stuck with them. We were nervous at some points. They ended up eventually hav- ing to claim bankruptcy, but a company bought them out, and we recovered the money. Last year, they were our second-biggest customer. Happy Holden: Earlier, you mentioned that you have two facilities in Shenzhen, China. That's fairly unusual. Hamlett: Yes, and they're not partnerships; we own them. Holden: Since you have more flexibility, is it possible to teach customers the NPI process you have and grow NPI engineers in your facil- ities in China? Hamlett: That's the whole idea behind it. In terms of the NPI facility, we want to open that up. We already had the China facility, so now you're going from design inception all the way to a worldwide order fulfillment as needed. There are very few CMs in our category size that can do that. It's a great selling feature for us, and it works. Johnson: Are you looking for new business areas? It sounds like this is a potential area of growth for you. Hamlett: Well, part of the growth for me, and not necessarily in China, is we don't do a lot of medical and military. The military industry is starting to pick up again. We held back from it over the last few years, and it is coming back, so we are going to try to concentrate more on that along with the medical. But we need some certifications to do that. We're going to get our AS9100 certification. We are 13485 certified in China for medical, but not at this location. Holden: Is there anything new coming out that we can expect to see at SMTA International in September? Or things that you're looking for that you hope to see there? Sprizza: As Lori works with customers on new products and designs, we get to see some of what the future is going to hold. That gives us an opportunity to start thinking about what equipment we might need to service the cus- tomers. We don't buy capital equipment because we hear that there's some new tech- nology coming out; we may never hear that from any of our customers. So, we wait for somebody to say that they need something, and we get the capital for it. Feinberg: We talked about the fact that you're looking at maybe getting involved in military and medical. Right now, what is your largest demographic? Hamlett: Industrial controls is currently our largest, and security is starting to increase because of everything going on in the world today. Johnson: Great. Thank you for your time today. Hamlett: Sounds good. Lori Giglio: Thank you. SMT007