Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1463464
APRIL 2022 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 27 Matties: Now to clarify, Voyager is your own platform that you developed? Kottke: Yes, it's my genius marketing tool that we built because aer so many years of trying to have third party soware talk to the MRP and the QMS system, it was costing too much— something like $30,000 to $40,000 a month to have a bunch of soware trying to talk to each other. We built our own and it's been a great investment. Matties: ere had to be some tangible ROI beyond just the soware to realize some com- petitive advantage. Kottke: Yeah, for sure. Voyager probably closes 90% of our sales tours. When you tell a cus- tomer you have data on almost three million boards assembled, it's compelling. Our record is 17 customers in a row. Aer the tour, they either ask, "At what point do you stop doing contract manufacturing and focus on so- ware?" or they say, "Voyager is worth more than Rocket, so what's the plan?" Matties: With the monitors everywhere in your facility, and the control you have with all the data coming at you, how do your competitors stand a chance? Kottke: If our competitors don't collect huge amounts of data all along the process, I don't know how they can survive. Here's a great example: We just worked with a customer who was complaining about a pricing scenario. We were able to break down every single process step, and tie it all back to one single part. ey were shocked. ey said, "Why doesn't any- one else push back on us?" Matties: And sourcing? Kottke: We're doing a lot of really cool things. We're looking at purchase history for the last 10 years, and then we compare that to the cur- rent MRP demand. Here's another example. ere's a connector for which we bought 1,500 pieces; the connector is $11 and some cents, in small quantity buys. We went back through and found we buy that connector 35 times a year because we have many customers who use it. With the data, business analytics, and some quick measurements, we realized that if we buy the components in 500-piece quanti- ties, we could have bought them for $8 each. anks to the soware, I can tell you that we have 11 component parts going onto boards that we've purchased more than a million of each. at's good information to know when you're a purchasing person. Matties: at's big—now more than ever, due to the current supply chain. Kottke: Now we're talking about a $4,500 posi- tive PPV on one line item, for a customer that generates almost 700 line items. When we can start analyzing costs like that, for exam- ple, doing 35 line items where we're purchas- ing it, that's 35 line items on a purchase order or (worst case) 35 purchase orders. Now you take out maybe 32 receipts, 32 purchases, 32 invoices, and then you're starting to make huge advantages. Matties: How do you manage this, in terms of programming and data collection, organizing, and sorting?