Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1345210
18 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2021 bring to the job? Do they need an engineering degree? Your background would say that it's not required. Tran: An engineering degree is great to have as a background. Good analytical and criti- cal thinking skills are very important because a lot of the issues that come to you are not always the same. For example, with my doc- tor, if my back hurts, it's very easy: just look at my back. Here, we get a board that doesn't work and there are 10 different things that could make the board not work vs. 10 dif- ferent things where we have yield problems. You've got to have good analytical and critical thinking skills to be able to think, "What can I do to eliminate and get to the root cause of why we're having low yield or why the prod- uct doesn't work?" And then you have to able to dissect it from there, find a root cause and fix the problem. Johnson: Walk me through a day in your work life. Tran: I'll give you today as a good example. I was pulled into a meeting this morning. We're having low yield on a customer product. I got into the meeting and I started walking through the steps. What are the steps involved in this product? What are we doing to this product? I go step-by-step. From there, I worked with the engineering team and we identified those areas where the product can fail, and we went through them one at a time. "Could it be this? No? Why? Tell me why it can't be this. Well, because we tested this section already. Okay, next section." I'm systematically eliminating issues. So now I'm down to two reasons why this thing could fail. Let's dive into those two reasons and figure out why it failed. And then once we figure out which one or both it is, we can say, "What do we do to implement so we can catch and get down to the reason why it failed?" It's a lot of process elimination, analytical, step-by-step process control. Process control is huge because for what we do as a manufacturer everything has processes—whether it's five processes or 10 processes, to build a product. We just need to backtrack, figure out where in the process that it failed that's causing us the yield problem, the time delay, and then attack those processes to see if we can control them and make it better. Johnson: You go through that sort of investiga- tion nearly every day? Tran: Yes, any time there's a failure. Some- times I hear, "e customer wants us to build 1,000 units a week and we can only do 600." Well, let's look at it. What can we do to make it faster? How do we get the yield up? Do we use more manpower or machines to make it faster? Where can we eliminate that bottleneck or gap to make it better? As a process engineer, I'm always looking at how to improve the product better, whether it's time or quality. It's a con- stant battle. Johnson: How much time do you spend on the initial analysis of a new build with a customer? As you see it, is that a significant part of the job as a process engineer? Tran: Yes. I would tell you probably 80–90% of the product we build is cookie cutter and straightforward. ere's 10–20% of our product Good analytical and critical thinking skills are very important because a lot of the issues that come to you are not always the same.