Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1491409
46 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2023 Johnson: Is it a requirement for you to have somebody from the company onsite to assist with that, or is this something you can usually do on your own? Kim: Most of the work takes place remotely. ey'll essentially send us their samples and files, and then we'll set up a virtual meet- ing where we can do a live demo of the system. ey aren't phys- ically seeing the system, but they are seeing what's happening on the system. I'd say that's at least 90% of the interaction at that stage. Johnson: Getting customers to give you the pieces and parts you need, as well as a test plan or some objectives to accomplish, is pretty critical to deciding whether you've got what they want. Kim: It also makes it fair, especially if they're looking at other vendors. ey can hold every- body to the same standards. Johnson: How do you handle a situation (if you've even experienced this) where your cus- tomer really doesn't quite know what they want? Say they're a little unsure about their goals, but they've reached out to get a sam- ple test done anyway. How do you guide them through that? Kim: We always try to help educate the cus- tomer. For example, in the measurements world, there are certain standards used to gauge how you verify how reliable or repeat- able a system is. ings like running a Gauge R&R, for example, as that can be performed on all the equipment, which makes things a lit- tle more binary—you know which system is performing better than the other systems. Fischthal: ere are a couple different options here. e customer brings their own board that they could use against mul- tiple companies, or you could use something more objective, some sort of Gauge R&R test to make things a little more objec- tive. Johnson: W h a t 's yo u r o v e r a l l advice for a prospective cus- tomer interested in working with you on this? We've just talked through what they should do here, but do you have a sense for how much pre- work this really is? Fischthal: e amount of work they must do is tied directly to how dedicated they are to put- ting the machine through its paces. ey could walk in, take a look, kick the tires, and feel like it's good to go. Or they could really go through it and have their own evaluation criteria pre- pared, where they add weights and values to everything from user friendliness to accuracy and repeatability. Each of these aspects has the potential to affect their process, so what they want to accomplish determines how much work they will need to do. I think this goes back to what Mitchell said earlier: You've got to have somebody dedicated to this project. You can't "share" it as a commit- tee; you need one person driving it, and they must put in the work to really figure out how in-depth they want to go. ey could do it in a couple of hours, or spend a couple of weeks deciding whether they want to bring a machine on site for a larger evaluation or whether they want to make an investment. Johnson: Let's say they've selected you and now it's time to prep the system, get it deliv- ered, uncrated, and installed. Is there a correla- tion between the amount of detail in the evalu- ation process and the ease of installation later? Kim: From the programming aspect, we can provide a lot of the work we do during the eval- Brent Fischthal