Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/564614
34 SMT Magazine • September 2015 data, and when you don't have the data how can you make the right decision? That's when you are chasing your tail. When there is a fail- ure people ask us, "How is it this can happen?" I say, "This was not the intention, number one. Number two, when we did it our intention was to give you better product, better copper, etc. If the process fails at some point on your end of it, we don't know what happens, so we need time to go back and we need to redo it to find and fix this problem." This is exactly what happens and now they don't have the patience. They say, "Well, it's your capacity, or you don't have the capability." I say, "Let's look at every element that came out of here." Sometimes when I look at the samples after, permutation com- binations may lead into these failures, and this is where nobody knows. Nobody knows because [there are] millions of permutation combinations. Matties: what is the solution? what do we do? somehow we have to break through this, right? Patel: Yes, we want to break through it. The way I see it, the fabricator needs support at the point a product is in R&D, especially when it is going to foreign agencies and out of the coun- try to be made. What data can be shared so that we can have better records to help fabricate it within the U.S.? If things go outside the U.S. we don't have anything. There's no data or com- munications for what is happening outside the U.S. When we learn about something new or hear it in the news they say, "Well, this goes to China or offshore." We have no communi- cations or data at all about what comes out of it there. What issues occurred? How were they corrected? What happens is that we figure out, instead of learning from each other, we have to learn from our own mistakes, which becomes very costly. That is the biggest challenge we are facing. If we allow open communications with offshore manufacturing I think we can learn a lot more. Matties: a lot of the work that was going offshore. Do you see some of that coming onshore and are you experiencing any of that firsthand? Patel: Yes, we are experiencing onshoring, ab- solutely. What has happened is they come back to onshoring because the demand is low. They don't come back to onshoring because they say, "Okay, now I'm doing a million digits in off- shore. Let me bring a million digits in domestic." No, those types of products don't come back. The only thing that comes back here is when the demand goes slow and those products are legacy products; then the work comes back here. Matties: in your expansions, when you look at your facility, do you look at automation as a di- rect labor cost reduction? and if so, how much reduction do you expect to get out of automa- tion? Patel: We are looking at it more from a reliabil- ity and quality standpoint, or what we call the yield factor—moving through more yields than labor. We still need people either way. Either you pay them a certain extent or you pay them for maintenance. You're paying somebody some- where. What we calculate is it's going to help us more on our primary goal, which is to increase the yield and productivity. Between those two, our objective is about a minimum of 20–30% for the product yielding phase of it. That is the key—the combination of yield and speed. Matties: so you eliminate handling; that's where most of the errors are produced. that increases yields and reliability, of course. i would think that it does have an effect on your labor cost, but what you're saying is it's not your primary motivation. Patel: We calculated that and it's not really impacting a whole lot because you need those people. Technically what you are doing is you're giving the people the right tools so they can produce more. I have 85 people over here. Do I plan on reducing them? No; not a single one. I would rather give them better tools so they can become more productive. I can shape more with the same people. I'm not planning to add any more people though, that I can say. Matties: the result is you add capacity without adding additional people. what you're saying is you can grow without the impact of higher labor bIG strAteGIes FOr suCCess continues interview