Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1221561
14 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2020 of control conversation about what's going on in that situation, and you're touching on that again. Customer demand is probably the ex- ternal factor that creates enough pressure and discomfort. But at some point, company man- agement has to internalize that locus of con- trol and make it about them, not just customer demands. Williams: Right. I've seen a number of exam- ples where people have gone through the certi- fication process. Now, they're advertising that they're best in the world, but nothing changed. They did it for the wallpaper; they didn't im- prove their processes, and their customers know that. Holden: In the last couple of years, have you achieved major successes working with cus- tomers where they have focused on eliminat- ing waste, inventory, and other problems that usually go unsolved? Williams: The majority of my clients over the last seven years have shown demonstrable im- provement in productivity, quality, profitabil- ity, and/or customer satisfaction. Every time you throw a board away, it goes directly to the bottom line. Matties: In the '80s, I worked in a shop, and their scrap rate was pretty high. They talked about profit sharing. I brought a pallet load of scrap boards into a meeting and started hand- ing them out, saying, "Here's your profit shar- ing." Everybody has a vested interest in high yields, and scrap happens for a lot of reasons, but you have to think of it in those terms. Ev- ery one of those boards is money out the door. Williams: Exactly. Matties: What are the latest buzzwords other than Lean, TQM, etc.? Williams: Branding is important because back in the day, Lean was the common buzzword; now, people are migrating to best practices, even though when you look at what they're what their reason is for doing that. If their rea- son is, "We want to make the company better and improve our processes," then that's some- body I'm going to engage with. But if they tell me, "Our customers are telling us we have to do this, so we're going to do it to get the cer- tification and hang it on the wall," then that's probably not a company I want to engage with because they're doing it for the wrong reasons. I talk to companies all the time and get a sense of what their values are and how they operate the business. I think of Calumet Elec- tronics, which is one of the last companies standing in the U.S., and there's a definite change in how they see the world of manu- facturing. Either you decide that you need to change and do things differently, or you risk not being around any longer. Johnson: What are some of the compelling events you've seen that helped the executive staff decide to change? Williams: Two primary drivers are if they're losing money and/or losing customers. Those could come from throwing too many products away, having too much waste, or not being ef- ficient, and those are directly related because the customer is going to pay for your ineffi- ciencies one way or the other, and they're not going to be very happy. Losing major custom- ers and seeing a downward trend in profitabili- ty are usually the wake-up calls that most com- panies need to finally look at their business differently. Johnson: You talked about what motivates a company to get a certification. That's an in- ternal locus of control versus an external locus Either you decide that you need to change and do things differently, or you risk not being around any longer.