Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/536970
44 The PCB Magazine • July 2015 ACCOMPLISH CHANGE TOGETHER (ACT) continues out of runway, so to speak. They might come to the fabricator and say, "Okay, I've designed this. I've modeled this. Can this be done?" It might not even test the way it's been modeled. It might not be possible to do, or certainly won't be with reasonable yields. You mentioned the unique nature of us being a distributor, which is one of the things that allows us to sit in the middle—not just of traditional PCBs, but we also have this whole space in the additive con- ductor area of printed electronics. We have a lot of conversations with the assembly shop. We understand the whole ecosystem and how it fits together, and we're continuously educating ourselves in that space. We want bring the best solution, regard- less of how it's produced. We have cases where we've gone together with customers and said, "Traditionally, you've etched that out of a copper-clad laminate, but have you consid- ered doing a cap layer with an additive con- ductor combined with an FR-4 stack up here?" And wow, all of a sudden cycle time is cut in half, yields go up, cost goes down, and they can enter a whole new arena they haven't been in before. But you're not going to get that kind of sea- change in a design or technology progression as a one man band. You've got to have every- one sitting around that table. We talked a few minutes ago about the opening chapter of the CID certification course, which says just that. It says you need to have a conversation with the designer, the fabricator, the assembler, and the whole food chain to make sure your design for manufacturability is appropriate, your sig- nal integrity is going to match what you mod- eled, etc. That's what we want to do. We want to shepherd all of the components of that food chain together and have productive discussion, because at the end of the day what keeps work in America is moving that technology needle. You've got to be forward-looking to do that, and that's really what the heart of ACT, for us, is about: helping our customers book more work in forward-looking technology tiers. Matties: It's the right idea, and that's how to stay competitive and move forward. And it puts you in a great position to sell a lot of product, too. Parent: That's true. The big thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that as much as I love to call on the OEMs, I am much more ef- fective calling on the OEMs with a fabricator- customer in tow. One of the things we've real- ized, when ACT came to be the acronym that we used to describe what we're doing, is that we had a few of our customers who were ACT- ing in accomplishing these changes on the prints with us. But it was a handful of those customers, and it was happening on a weekly basis. So we started putting a lot more atten- tion into collaborating with our customers, and as I broke it down and I tried to get my next customer on board I would say, "Look. We have some customers on a scale of 1–10 that are in a range of maybe 7 or 8. That's as high up the scale as we get today. I am going to get a few customers that are in the 10 range. Right now, Mr. Customer, you're at a level 2 with us. Your competitor is in a 5 or a 6 range with us. How do we get you up that scale?" I expect that we're going to have more than 5% of our customers who are engaged in this pro - gram with us. We're eventually going to have every single one of our customers engaged in this, where they trust us with their customers and with their salespeople, where we are work- ing with them on a daily basis. And that's how we're going to sell more of the Isola and Du- Pont product. Feature Ken Parent (left) and Jason marsh (right).