Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1447212
30 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2022 All the developments that I did in our first factory at Whelan were internal. e wastewa- ter technology, unique processes, and every- thing, that was just time—measuring things, breaking things out, analyzing them and hav- ing the time to do that. Process engineering should be independent of the manufacturing group. In the U.S. PCB shops, it's not the case. It's part of the manufacturing group. It's not an independent group that just does process engi- neering and development. ey're just working on parts all the time. ere aren't enough people to get things done. is is really the challenge. You must staff it. You do that either with adding people or kill- ing people with hours if it's a family business, I guess. Matties: Right. Well, part of it is capital. People say that there's not a lot of profit le in circuits, and so it's that chicken and egg thing. You have to commit to your future to invest the dollars today. Stepinski: Barry, I think if you can improve your yields and reduce your cycle time, you can charge more for your product. First, people will tolerate that to some extent because you're adding value. Second, you reduce your costs internally for wastes. It's knowing up front the best way to approach it. You must analyze your existing organization and see where the weak- nesses are. Ideally you do it by getting rid of the weaknesses, adding the talent, and paying for it that way. is is one way to approach it if you truly have not one penny to spend. Matties: You must make your choices. I think the word you used earlier was culture. What you're describing is, back from the 1980s, TQM or total quality management. e goal is to reduce waste, and we have evolved tools to help us do that in ways that we didn't have then. When we start looking at that, it's about eliminating waste in every step of your process. Right now, we're talking about manufac- turing processes, but when you look at total input cost, this attitude should be carried out through all your systems, sales process, and accounting processes, because you're talking about a culture of continuous improvement, as we've been talking about or defining. Stepinski: I think we need to rest on the agile lean stuff that's been done. Particularly, there are a lot of agile tools in the market that are very inexpensive that you can get out of the cloud and start setting up your different pro- cess steps. You can do business processes with many different tools. ERP, for example, is for finance people. Manufacturing needs an MES system. Engineering needs a PLM system. is is what's needed to make the whole package work. e finance people make the decisions when the margins are so low because it's what it comes to at the end. Matties: But as you're talking about education, I also think there's a level of training or educa- tion of process improvement, generally logis- tics and systems education, that needs to hap- pen on a general level.