Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1361971
16 PCB007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2021 Matties: How would you define the role of a su- pervisor in a PCB facility? Thompson: at's an interesting question. For years, I was a supervisor at Praegitzer Indus- tries; I ran seven different departments. At one point, I went to my manager and said, "Sir, I do not know everything about all seven of these departments that I am supervising or manag- ing." And he said, "You don't have to. You don't have to know everything about it. What you have to know is how to deal with the people in that department. e people in that depart- ment actually manage themselves." And that's actually a very true statement. Matties: Yes, I think so. For the sales team who's out selling the products, I would think a pro- cess engineer is a vital member of that sales team. Explain how that relationship between process engineering and sales works to the customer. Thompson: Frequently, our outside salespeople would just take me along. ey'd start off by going to a customer and saying, "Have you got anything coming up?" And if they had some- thing that was coming up that was a little tricky, they'd say, "I'm not familiar with that, but I'll tell you what, I'm going to grab Mark and I'm going to bring him here and we'll sit down; we'll have lunch, talk about it, and see what we can work through on this." Sometimes it didn't work out at all. Sometimes I'd say, "is isn't a capability that we can support at this time. I understand it; I can tell you about it; I can give you the drawbacks. But I can't necessarily tell you that we support it." Other times I'd say, "at's something we do all the time. at's a daily process for us." So yes, I'd say it's high- ly effective to have an outside salesperson in- tegrally involved in process engineering and have basically an application engineer. Matties: Because what could happen in a facili- ty is you could have a process engineer that's so busy in your sales department that they're not doing process engineering. Thompson: Happens all the time. Process en- gineering runs the whole gamut, all the way from ROI of a piece of equipment, what that takes, why I am looking at that particular piece of equipment and what it's going to take to get it into my facility. ere's not only how the chemistries play with each other, but there are also environmental considerations. You may have to go through and set up a whole new thing with the county you're in and say, "I'm bringing on this particular chemistry and I'm bringing on this particular process, here's a de- scription of the process." You have to detail the process. Matties: Right. Waste treatment certainly is a large consideration, because that could cre- ate big problems with your effluent if you don't take care of it up front. Thompson: Absolutely. We used to say at Pro- totron that the outgoing water is cleaner than the incoming water, and it's a true statement. It absolutely was cleaner than the incoming wa- ter with the double pH preadjusts and all the stuff that's on the backend. It was considerably cleaner going out than it was coming in. I guess the sheer volume of the water that we were going through and the amount of met- als-bearing water that was going through the shop at any given time didn't actually warrant a huge tank in the backyard, if you will, to be able to store the outgoing water, to be able to recycle it. Truthfully, in a lot of cases, they ac- tually were recycling the water on the line. But as far as the final outgoing water, no, they just did a pH-free adjust and it went out. Matties: A lot of what we're talking about is project-based activities. What about the dai- ly process improvement strategy where you're taking your existing process and tightening up the operating parameters?