Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1411055
24 PCB007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2021 place in the strategic direction of the company. Automation becomes a big part of maintaining and improving margins, but as everything gets faster, cheaper, denser, and more complex, you also need that repeatability and reproduc- ibility that automation allows to maintain your high quality standards and the product reli- ability that today's customers are expecting. Streamlining, continuous improvement, and cost reductions on a strategic roadmap make sense for a business like Sunstone today. Five or 10 years ago, automation was a sec- ondary thought for many of our manufactur- ing plans and not a frontline strategic plan. To- day, we are really seeing the need to elevate these improvement concepts to be included with company-wide strategic initiatives. With planned improvements to our overall capabil- ities and our manufacturing technology, plan- ning to retrofit some of our current processes and equipment with some more automation and repeatability makes a lot of sense for all those reasons we've talked about. Johnson: Five years ago, Sunstone had strate- gic initiatives underway to set the stage for au- tomation. Let's talk about that. What has been done and what results have you seen from them? Stevenson: Almost five years ago, Sunstone re- moved its whole MRP skeleton and virtually overnight made it customer-facing by replac- ing our whole quoting module, pricing mod- ules, ERP system, e-commerce website, and shop floor tracking soware with the vision that we would be able to automate not only the quoting and ordering process, but through the front end, CAM engineering, and then into manufacturing to really help streamline that front end process. It was so successful that we began to take or- ders that first day without really missing a beat in terms of the process itself. Were there hic- cups and bumps? Were there unhappy cus- tomers? Yes, but that's all part of the growing pains of replacing an entire system like that. e number one objective at the time was to improve the overall experience for the custom- ers, making it a more straightforward and sim- plified process as well as providing them new functionality that they had been asking for. A secondary objective was to streamline the en- tire front end of our process. In the years since then, we've continued to make improvements to the customer-facing portion of the process in support of the first objective, leaving little time to work on the secondary objective and have not automated the processes any more. If we had to do it again, would there be more fo- cus on the streamlining objective? e answer would be a resounding yes. We do have several programs in develop- ment today that are currently in the "proving the concept" and "validation of process" with our IS team that we should start rolling out by the end of this year—which I am excited to see. Some improvements are with our custom- er-facing site but also laying the groundwork for additional front-end automation. We are going to be jumping into the mobile website world, creating a great customer experience Matt Stevenson