Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1505694
AUGUST 2023 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 11 my career as an electronics designer here at SEL, designing circuit boards to go inside our products. We'd send the Gerbers off to a manu- facturer, and about two weeks later, I'd get the PCB back. Now when our engineers are done with a design, they can send it to our factory that's seven miles away, and probably have the board back in a couple of days and start testing. Matties: Now, when you're developing strategy, what are key considerations? Well, it has to fit within our mission state- ment. We build products and solutions for the electric power industry, so we're prob- ably not going to build electric cars today. But it does give us enough path- way to come up with new, innovative stuff. While our core devices measure current and voltage on a power system, we also manufacture a line of eth- ernet switches. You might ask, "How does an ether- net switch fit into mak- ing electric power safer and more reliable?" Well, we use these switches to connect our devices and control power systems, so that communication device becomes really critical. I'm not going to build a switch that competes with Cisco; rather, I'm going to tai- lor my solution to fit the needs of our particu- lar industries. Matties: But when you're describing that, you're focused in on a core set of strategies. How do you look to build a strategy for the future? at is the fun part! It's my job to figure out and anticipate the challenges our customers will have tomorrow, whether it's integrating a new renewable source of energy, or figuring out how all these devices will communicate. ation, about eight pages front and back, and really described the way we want to operate the business. ere were about 25–30 employ- ees at that time. Now we have 6,300 employees all over the world, and we maintain that orig- inal culture and strategy across the company. e very first part of those principles of oper- ation are our nine values. e first two, qual- ity and customer focus, really set the tone for how we do business. Every product and ser- vice we develop will be high quality. Our strat- egy around customers begins with how we will provide what we call PQFIDS—price, quality, features, innovation, delivery, and service. at equates to the value that we'll provide to our customers. It must be all six of these crite- ria, which is really valu- able to our employee owners, and our cus- tomers. Matties: SEL is a com- pany that has really embraced vertical inte- gration. At your PCB factory, just by having a shop and the design- ers and the collabora- tion opportunities here, I imagine that you're finding benefits that you didn't expect to see on a typical ROI sheet. Yes, we are. It's an education in and of itself. You know, I'm one of these types of engineers: I really don't understand something until I do it wrong about three or four times. When you build something yourself, you have to understand how it works. When you get to a level of expertise with something, you're able to modify whatever you're doing to meet the needs of your customers. It's proba- bly better, cheaper, and faster than what we're getting from our existing suppliers—not that our existing suppliers were bad by any means. We can do things a lot faster here. I started David Whitehead, CEO of SEL.