Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1284035
62 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2020 For some customers, we will do one-day turns on turnkey assembly, and that means mak- ing the fab suppliers jump through hoops. We overnight parts. It's very typical for us to do three- to five-day turns, so about 60 to 70% of our business is quick-turn prototyping, and it means really quick. About 30–35% of our business is low- and medium-volume produc- tion. We do lots of runs of 500 boards, 1,000 boards—even 6,000 boards is not an uncom- mon volume for us. But to your point, partic- ularly anything that's consumer-related and where the volumes start getting up to 10,000 a week, we then facilitate offshore production with our customers. Holden: With that kind of performance and response, you need to have a highly trained and flexible workforce capable of doing a lot of different things. Are you having problems finding that level, or do you have an exten- sive training program to take the middle of the road worker and turn them into the super flex- ible type of person you need for your kind of business? Malmrose: That's our secret sauce! COVID- 19 has changed the business a bit, and we're dealing with that, but in any given day pre- COVID-19, sometimes we were running 35 dif- ferent jobs a day in the shop. And even now, we run not quite the 35, but we're way up there. We're jamming here, and we are crank- ing with basically 100% of the work- force we had before COVID-19. And with such a high percentage of what we do being quick-turn, everything is different. On the production side, doing augmented or virtual reality really could be quite interesting for us to take a look at. But on the quick turn side of the business, many boards have ECOs and need special atten- tion, so we wouldn't put together anything that would say let's repli- cate the build unless it falls into the production side. We do everything in the Bay. Holden: But you're in the center for all the quick innovations that come out of Silicon Val- ley, and they can, in less than an hour, prob- ably drive to your place and drop all this stuff on you. Malmrose: That happens a lot, but what is a lit- tle bit surprising, and maybe it's just because we do some cool stuff here, is we have custom- ers from all over the U.S. I'd have to do a geo- graphic segmentation. About 50–55% might be the Bay, add another 10% for Southern Cali- fornia, and we have probably 40% of our busi- ness all over the United States. We do a lot of overnight shipping, and so we're beyond just the Bay Area. Holden: That means that you have a reputation if they come from all over the place for your services. I noticed you are ITAR. Malmrose: We are. We're ITAR, AS9100, and ISO 13485. We're not TS. We build products for quite a few automotive companies, but we've not looked into the TS certification at this time. Most of the automotive work is pro- totypes, small runs. A lot of it is sensors and that kind of stuff, and that then moves off to Asia, so we haven't gone there yet. Feinberg: Do you see any indication of things moving back? Test and box build.