Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1259453
28 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 gone away. The techniques of how you do it have been modified over time and adapted to specific instances, industries, and equipment. It's the core of what everyone does. Quality is fundamental. You must have some form of a quality system, as well as operators involved in running and managing the process, or you're going to fail. It's not a top-down approach; it's a bottom-up approach. The people doing the work have to believe in it and stick to the pro- cesses that they're trained to do and give feed- back when they don't work and, most impor- tantly, they then need to be rewarded after the improvement shows a positive result. Johnson: That's an interesting perspective be- cause some of the other TQM experts that I've talked to, such as Happy Holden, stated that to make TQM effective, it has to be pushed from the top down. The CEO has to buy into it en- tirely. Perhaps it's a top-down and bottom-up approach simultaneously. The vision and pri- ority need to come from above, but the com- mitment to doing the tasks needs to be a bot- tom-up approach. Korf: Yes, because that's where it gets imple- mented. The people who run the equipment, carry the boards around, and do the front-end engineering are the bottom line. If you go in and say, "We have to con- stantly improve," but you never do what they suggest or ask them what their opin- ion is, they're not going to buy into it. It becomes just another chart they show off every Friday afternoon. I agree with the top-down push, but I don't like the term push as much as sup- port. The top-down ap- proach gives you the process and how they want to man- age it, but they also need to support what they hear even if it's bad news and contra- dictory to what they believe. Support people, test it, and see if it has an impact. And if it does, imple- ment it. Then, you get the buy-in. It's both ways. If there's a bottom-up approach and no one cares, then it's dead. It's like, "We have an employee suggestion plan where there are 1,000 suggestions put in every month," but then you only do three of them, so people quit sending suggestions. Johnson: With what the industry faces today— the challenges exposed by COVID-19, recent tariff changes, and exposure of choke points in the supply chain throughout the whole manu- facturing process, especially with PCBs—what advice do you have for PCB manufacturers with regard to their total quality management approach? Korf: COVID-19 adds another layer right now because we don't fully understand how it works yet. There's not a cure, in case you do get it, or a vaccination to inhibit you from getting it. Ev- eryone worries about employee protection, and money is spent wisely on protecting employees so that they don't get hurt, injured, or killed. This adds another layer of cleanliness that you have to maintain. Fortunately, a lot of the pro- cesses are already in cleanroom environments, so some of them will be much easier to imple- ment additional processes than others.