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30 SMT Magazine • July 2015 are a part of that and we want to see it. They said nobody else does that. Sorry, we're not ev- erybody else. It was hard for them to get used to. Matties: But the results of the three-step process that you have, and the continual verification and injecting yourselves into the process, sounds like a formula that's made your product quality incred- ibly high. Thomson: Our CEO and president have been with the company since its beginning. In the last ATM (all team meeting), the CEO said that the quality of our products and the respect of our suppliers have never been greater. The president said it in one of his staff meetings as well. He said that we have never had a product with this level of quality in the history of the company. Matties: in terms of your supply chain manage- ment, doing all this minimizes the exposure that many people experience in supply availability. Beller: This involvement also lets you keep your pulse on the labor and part cost in different re- gions, which can be useful. n I saw this involvement firsthand as the two teams began reviewing a PowerPoint of DD&TT's recent audits and scorecard. EchoStar's suppli- ers get a quarterly grade based on a number of things laid out in extensive spreadsheets: qual- ity and shipping trends, defects per million op- portunities (DPMO) for each component, NPI support, customer support, paradigm shifts, and the list goes on. The word that comes to mind is rigorous. Just last year, EchoStar's quality team did 175 audits re-qualifying or qualifying companies. This assures continued high quality and delivery performance for current suppliers. It also assures EchoStar's basic quality/cultural standards are met before they can be considered for the AVL. EchoStar's Diamond award exem- plifies the highest standard of quality in manu- facturing and supply chain management that the EchoStar team is striving to achieve. This award is not easily obtained, needing scores of 98.5/100 or higher for four consecutive busi- ness quarters. It is earned through dedication to process improvement and 100% commitment to work with the EchoStar team. If this is the level of effort needed from both the OEM and the EMS to achieve great quality and supply chain management, then it's no surprise why most companies struggle. Many OEMs might be tempted to take the best price and run without considering much else, only to have it come crashing down later. EchoStar has an idea of best practices, which they expect their suppliers to live up to, more FeAture injection molding: outgoing quality control inspection. post-wave-solder board inspection. ECHOSTAR: THE FuTuRE OF SuPPly CHAIN MANAGEMENT DONE RIGHT continues