Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1228683
20 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2020 spread out your employees and keep as many of them employed as possible. Kadah: Absolutely. We're going to four shifts. And people will still get weekends, but their weekend might be a Monday and Tuesday in- stead of a Saturday and Sunday. I've figured out that with 168 hours in the week, I can run four 40 hour shifts and have the extra eight hours as separation time for when people come and go so that I don't have too many people in the building at any given time, even at shift change. We're going to see how it works. Johnson: It's interesting that you're able to adjust your resources and spread them out thanks to how your facility is set up and still comply with a government mandate to reduce your staff to 25% of normal while keeping ev- erybody employed. Kadah: We're very open with our people, telling them, "If we don't supply to our customers, and they don't order anything from us as a result of that, then the next choice is layoffs or furloughs or cutting the staff." When we had the fire, no one could enter the building for 18 days due to the air contamination in the building. I had peo- ple working all the way through the Fourth of July holiday, and I was flipping burgers outside, cooking them lunch. We went into 24/7 opera- tions at that point. Our employees were inter- ested in maintaining their jobs. We have a tight enough group where we all pull together. We can roll over and lose our jobs, or we can all pull together and make the exceptional effort we need to make to survive. We did it three years ago, and we're going to have to do it again. Johnson: What's your take on how much your recent factory automation work enabled this nimbleness for you? You're responding to the market and government orders on staffing, keeping your manufacturing up near capacity for your customers. Do you see opportunities for growth based on the automation? Kadah: For circuit board rebuilds, we replaced the equipment we had and spent an additional $2 million to upgrade what we lost in the fire. We now have additional robot stations that load and unload conveyor systems, including the vertical continuous plating unit that we bought from UCE. The robots came standard on that piece of equipment. We also moved to direct im- aging as opposed to film imaging on our circuit boards. We still ended up with a screen print- ing operation for our solder mask and legend because most of our boards didn't require any- thing more than that. We were considering go- ing for inkjet printing on the circuit board, but none of the companies could convince us that it was mature enough that we wanted to risk it. In the wet process equipment, my circuit board manager, Scott Dixon, who has been running that shop for 25 years, realized that he now had the opportunity to do bath mon- itoring, dosing, and chemistry rebalancing through the control system as opposed to man- ually checking things with the PLCs built into the equipment. We still manually check the chemistries, but the machines autodose the baths to bring them back into appropriate pH, for instance. And they monitor the turbidity of something and then adjust water accordingly. Our automation will allow for a lower skill lev- el operator, which also enables running mul- tiple shifts. Here we are now, faced with that challenge. I can't have my top employee work 24 hours a day, so I'm going to have a variety of staffers and rely on the closed-loop feedback systems that we have built into this equipment. I don't think the chemistry is going to get out of whack every 16 hours. There will be a little bit of risk, but we're going to be fine because the frequen- cy at which we have to do a manual interven- tion right now is weeks—not hours or days. Johnson: Will this increase your capacity? Kadah: It will increase the capacity, but not because of the panels per hour. It will be due to the number of hours I can run by allowing us to expand the number of hours per week without having to have the chemist right there babysitting the equipment on the second and third shifts.