Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1348195
16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2021 It's a matter of knowing which customer you need to factor in that you're going to have poor information. We used to joke that we should put a statement on the wall that says, "As an hourly company, we benefit from your ineffi- ciencies." Matties: Happy, at HP, did the same thing. Happy Holden: Yes, the VP called me in one time because the project managers were com- plaining about what I was estimating in terms of time, and what I was charging them, and I just showed him the data. I said, "Look at this particular project engineer or project manager and how many times he switched components on me; even when we thought we were done, he changed the schematic. Now, look at this project manager who does his simulation, and gets his ducks in a row. Everybody knows their jobs. ey supply us, and it doesn't conflict. We race right through it, so I always give him a discount because I'm giving him the money back that I charge these other project manag- ers as a surcharge." You don't just throw things over the wall, because getting additional costs to re-spin hurts our time to market. Kolar: Or very carefully manage who you pair with a customer. We know our customers, and we know our employees, so I know that if I have a particularly squirrelly customer, I need to put them with an engineer or designer who's really good at managing their customer and controlling that squirrel, versus putting them with a designer who just follows them and says, "Okay. You want to do this? Okay." Because three months later, they're still going to be working on that 20-hour board. Matties: What's the greatest obstacle from get- ting this to a smooth process, if you will? What is that remaining hurdle we have to get over to make this shi happen? Kolar: It's agreeing about what quality is, and that it's not just connecting the dots. e board should look pretty. Everything should be aligned. Everything should be easy to review, and I think, "Will it work just as well if all your caps are slightly off ?" Maybe, but how do you know that the person who was sloppy doing that layout wasn't sloppy with something else that actually matters? It's stepping back and defining, "What is a finished product? What is quality?" Part of it can be helped with checklists, and we do that. "Hey, here are our input guide- lines, and here's the input we need from the customer. Here's a review checklist you go through before you go to the fabricator. Here's a form you can send to your fabricator plus a stackup." You can have best practices, but, ultimately, you need people to care about that quality and be proud of what they do. Matties: To your point, it speaks to whether you're sloppy, if you care, and what's important. Kolar: Sure. We always have constraints, so is cost our top constraint? Is it time? Where is that constraint? It's important to be very up- front: I know I really need three months for this design, but you're telling me I have two, so we're making compromises, or we're going to be sacrificing somewhere and acknowledging, "Okay, just upfront, this is getting sacrificed. is isn't." And we document that so that the next time you pick it back up, you know that the reason this whole section looks like crap is it wasn't very critical. We used to joke that we should put a statement on the wall that says, "As an hourly company, we benefit from your inefficiencies."