Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1309864
NOVEMBER 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 21 Holden: When you started operating at full speed as a captive, did you plan all of the ad- vantages that you reaped in coming back from China? Was that expected or serendipitous? And when did the "this model could be ex- tended to state of the art" vision develop? Was that vision always there, or did it develop over time? Stepinski: With the original factory, our CEO at the time (who has since passed), had a great vision to vertically integrate the company, take the profit from his suppliers, and integrate it into his bottom line to give himself flexibility. PCBs were the last big piece that he did before he retired, and when I interviewed with them the day before Christmas Eve in 2012, his vi- sion was a highly automated factory that was as green as possible. Was there a need to be zero discharge? No. Did he define the automa- tion level? No. These are just general concepts that he wanted. He wanted it to just be done in a nice way. But then we ran into the road- blocks of it being very onerous to go ahead with environmental permitting with the con- ventional design. The real problem was the business plan. When I first joined them, I eval- uated what I had thought the ROI would be, and there was no ROI from the convention- al approach. He was a big risk taker to some extent, and he always said, "Even though the company says it can't be done, there's not enough time or money. Neither is relative." We ended up paying more for the original factory than he had originally planned, but the net of it was that he got much more than he wanted. At the end of the day, he got a revo- lutionary green facility and the highest auto- mation level in the world at the time. We were lucky that we had quite a bit of serial num- ber one equipment and that product technolo- gy was simple; otherwise, we couldn't debug it all and make it all work to his plan. After that was done and we were in pro- duction, I had a lot of inquiries from folks be- cause of some of the publicity surrounding the factory, and I was given a lot of opportu- nity to do something somewhere. I came back and spoke to our new CEO at the time and ex- plained what the market looked like, as well as the opportunities, and he made the decision that we should make some additional invest- ments in our existing facility because we were in a unique position. I researched and identified the business plan and proposed a couple of different scenarios of the plan, such as whether we wanted to do it slowly or really fast. They chose the highest upfront investment and the fastest approach, and we went with it. We focused on the high- tech market. Has the technology focus changed as we've gone through the lifecycle to now? Yes, it has. We did a build in the old approach. After you do that, you think, "This is great, but what about this weird thing that we were thinking about?" Now, we're incorporating a lot of the feedback from the customers and up- dating product lines, bartering with these com- panies that we're building factories for, and learning together. I have customers in my fac- tory every day, building their own products, learning from it, and giving us feedback be- cause it's not just us; it's our little consor- tium of people we're building factories with, and we're all feeding back and getting a lot of skilled economies from this feedback and de- velopment. That's how everything has evolved. Matties: Thank you so much. Stepinski: Thanks for the opportunity to talk. Matties: It was our pleasure. Take care. PCB007