Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1477844
34 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2022 Johnson: Earlier, you mentioned adding some new vendor suppliers. Now that you've gone through the process, and as the parts supply starts to ease, is it your intent to keep those suppliers? Have you found value in having a wider, more distributed supplier network? Lentz: Yes I have, but it will be a mix. Fran- chises, as you know, are different in North America than they are in Europe or Asia. Some of the franchise suppliers we have activated are new to us, whether they're in Europe or in Asia. Our division in China was probably deal- ing with them directly; we didn't have them set up domestically, but now we do. Will we use them in the future when it eases? Yes, certainly, but they may not be the first option. I will look to limit the brokers or the non-franchises as we have our corporate preferred list; I like to keep it to three or four. With that being said, we realized that with the ones we had, Europe was not their strong point, so we picked up a very highly respected, accredited, non-fran- chised supplier in Europe that has done some great work for us. Johnson: As I think through using soware tools more oen, it stands that if you've only got two suppliers, what the soware can report back to you is very limited. You talked about working with cus- tomers to do redesigns around partic- ularly troublesome parts. How has that changed at Emerald? Lentz: at's true. We have tried to become much more proactive. We use a third-party soware tool as the in-house tool at all our sites. With our customers, we want to express the urgency, as well as give them as much information as we can. Silicon Expert allows you to have the part on the AVL. We have a compo- nent engineering team that will look at the alternate, and then you can do an exact comparison between two of the deltas. With our customers, we have found that all their engineering resources are strained, but if we give them the information they need up front, we get resolution much quicker. It tends to go to the top of their pile if they don't have to do the digging. We have some supply chain initiatives right now. One of them is to further streamline the alternatives process. It will engage our custom- ers, but what other information could we give them? Our tools do a wonderful job looking at obsolescence and providing proactive feed- back to our customers. ey have realized the strain it puts on their engineering resources, and they had to focus more attention on it. We never vary from the customer AVL because we have no design authority. ey must update their AVL. Johnson: Is this analysis and feedback process you're just describing something you proac- tively do for OEM customers? Is there a trig- ger or a threshold where you bring that in, or is that only by customer request? How does that process initiate? Lentz: We do as many as we can proactively. Many times, they don't come up in a quar- terly business review (QBR) or just in a regular business discussion.