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24 SMT Magazine • July 2015 ECHOSTAR: THE FuTuRE OF SuPPly CHAIN MANAGEMENT DONE RIGHT continues Next, I was able to share a word with Les Beller, senior manufacturing engineer and Andy Thomson, VP of operations, about EchoStar's unique relationship with their suppliers and how they go about choosing an EMS provider. Matties: it must be very rigorous for Echostar's suppliers because you really inject yourself into a company; not everybody is going to be willing or capable of this. Les Beller: That's true. With the volume of busi- ness that we bring forward, a lot of people will let us see what they're about on the surface, and as time goes on and they see the benefit of our involvement and what we bring to the table, technically and through our experience, they tend to open up a lot more. This factory is a prime example of that. Early on, DD&TT needed some of that input, and we've grown re- ally well together. Over the years, we've developed audit pro- cesses for both contract manufacturers as well as suppliers to the company. We've got check- lists, ongoing scoring requirements, sample qualifications, and we put up a lot of up-front regulations before we allow use of a supplier or CM. There's definitely a preset testing that they have to pass through and some of that includes actual part testing, like qualification from the hardware engineering group of samples. Will the part or product that is being supplied to us pass all of our requirements? Shipping, shock, consumer damage, consumer stress, as well as down to the piece parts supplier—where/when they're shipping their parts to us, and are they going to survive when they get here? Are they going to be able to do what the spec requires them to do to become one of the parts within our set-top box? Matties: so there's the technical capability side of it, but there's also, as micah was pointing out, the cultural side. Andy, you mentioned that some- times you go visit the dorms where people are liv- ing. tell us why you do that. Andy Thomson: We do that because we're a company that believes people should be treated like people and not like cattle. Quite frankly, we've fired smaller CMs we were using for what I considered less than humane treatment of employees. How people are treated is very im- portant to us. When we walk into a factory we want people to be smiling and look at us, not have their heads down. We don't want to see any kind of nasty environment, like tools with makeshift handles made up of tape. We had one vendor that we fired about five years ago, and their board of directors removed their key management soon afterward. Since then they've brought in some great people. First thing the new president did was close the cafeteria for executives and salaried employees and made it so everybody eats together. If the food was good enough for upper management, it was good enough for their workforce. Then they opened up an Internet café where people can pay a small amount of money and play video games and surf. The money goes into a 7-Eleven type of store on campus where they can buy things that are substantially cheaper than a store in town. This is all in our supplier code of conduct, where it's written that we can show up unan- nounced at the doorstep of any supplier and be on their floor in five minutes. That's how we fired this board company. Then they changed and FeAture les beller, senior manufacturing engineer.