Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1419905
OCTOBER 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 13 Johnson: Are you at full capacity now that you have new equipment? Do you still have room for more sales? Patel: ings are moving more smoothly in the shop. We're comfortable. It's not like we're thinking, "Oh my gosh, we're going to fail at everything." It's a well-controlled production environment right now. And we wouldn't have seen that last year. Matties: How much money or investment did you put in the front end of your factory, the planning side? Patel: We actually made a big purchase on the soware side as well. We use Ucamco's Inte- gr8tor pre-CAM automation soware, and we're putting it all together with Integr8tor and some scripting; there's a lot of heavy liing done on the soware automation side before we even get to our engineers. It's good that you brought it up, but we have a lot of soware tweaks that were done to make life easier for engineers as well. Matties: Now, when you're bringing in all this new technology, like front-end soware and in the shop with equipment and workflow pro- cess. How do you address the learning curve or the training that you have to do? Patel: It's all done on the managerial side first. We say, "If we're going to put in something, we need the top guys to know what's going on first, and then the trickle-down training from there." e great thing is that a lot of these on the soware side or the equipment side; they have a good technical base to ongoing questions and things like that. It's easier to contact and get ahold of someone to help you out. e great thing is that a lot of this equipment is a lot easier to run now- adays because they've developed something like a human proof version, I suppose. So they're finding it a lot easier to run the machines or run the soware, and that's the whole idea. Matties: Are you seeing more of a connected factory feel at your facility now? Patel: We haven't gotten to that point where we're at 4.0. We're a smaller shop, so it's harder to see the benefit of that side yet—maybe once we scale a little bit more. e good thing is that as managers we have a lot of eyes on the floor. Once it gets to the point where it's not manage- able by us, that's when it starts becoming more important. Matties: As you talk about the new equipment being human proof, that's the first step to what we would deem a smart process. Eventually, you get enough of these smart processes inside your facility and suddenly you're a smart fac- tory. Patel: Exactly. It will happen before we realize it. Matties: When you're looking at your own bud- get, do you set a CapEx budget, or is this an opportunity-based authorization of expense? Patel: It was opportunity-based this time. We didn't have a budget going into this year. We wanted to pull the trigger as the opportunity to purchase the equipment arose. It was a bit of a risk on our side because we didn't necessarily have the budget at the beginning, and we grew into it as we went along. Johnson: Now that this is paying off, how are you planning to reinvest some of this extra money for further growth? Once it gets to the point where it's not manageable by us, that's when it starts becoming more important.