Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1477844
36 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2022 Once you get the data, the customer will ask, "What are the available alternates?" at dig- ging creates a little bit more work. Our part- ner does do it, for a cost. Some customers have taken advantage of that by looking at BOM scrubs for their products. We can do a quick scrub for new customers. If they want to give us a BOM, we can give them a life cycle analy- sis. It won't give them all the alternates, but it will tell which parts are at risk, either end of life, or going end of life in the next year. Manufacturers are end of life-ing parts much quicker now. We see that. Johnson: So far, we've been talking about find- ing the parts, but once they come into the receiving dock, how do you verify them? Has that changed? Lentz: It's standard to require the marking on the reels. Some of the parts are scanned in, based on the reel marks so it matches what's in the system. With other parts, we fully inspect. Some customers have different requirements for inspection. We have a very good VMI pro- gram with some major distributors. We specify and make sure the label matches exactly. Every part brought in from a non-franchised supplier is looked at, whether in an automated way or under manual inspection. Johnson: Is this an external inspection or do you run an X-ray? Lentz: Some require X-ray, but we don't run X-ray onsite. Some non-franchise suppliers will do it as a matter of business for us, which is our preferred, but some of our major custom- ers require third-party testing. We have to send it to a GETS or one of the other testing houses. Johnson: Would you say X-ray testing seems to be on the increase? Lentz: Yes, absolutely. We've had situations where we've had our preferred brokers stop parts. We've had GETS catch one part. is year we're reaching the bottom of the barrel of the stock. We're very leery of using brokers that we don't know. If it's someone that our customer directs us to use, we require them to sign up for that buy or take liability for it. Johnson: Do you find this happening where, once you get into the assembly process, and you find a problem mid-process or something actually escaped, now you've got bad parts on a board for a customer? I ask as a measure of counterfeits, not your build quality. Lentz: I'll tell customers, even with the third- party testing, it's not foolproof. My concern is that even with the third-party testing, like for an issue like timing, in dealing with our com- ponent engineering there is still that small bit of concern. Our brokers are very good; if anything looks questionable, they will stop it. at's why I use them. Obviously, we don't want to use a bro- ker that isn't at least an ERAI, that doesn't have the certifications that we're looking for. When a customer directs us to one that we have no history with, I'm very leery of using them. If our guys can't find the parts and these guys just happen to come up with those parts—and it does happen—I'm a little nervous. We need to make sure that we're not putting our customer or ourselves at risk. We had one incident where a customer had a part that somebody had pulled out of the