Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/582861
October 2015 • The PCB Magazine 19 ment impact, all of the environmental impacts. This factory is the first green circuit board fac- tory in the world. We only use 500 gallons of water a day. We don't have a wastewater permit, and we don't have any air toxics. We don't even generate hazardous waste. We have designed all those issues out. Matties: Something is being generated. How are you handling that? Stepinski: Every process has its own engineering controls to eliminate the waste to the greatest level possible—waste minimization. Some pro- cesses have no waste at all and some do, and we deal with that in a very non-hazardous way. The solids at the end come out non-hazardous and they are recyclable. Matties: No permits are required. You already had a building. They had an empty shell here that they gave you to work with, so you had some design constraints but you built a nice, rectangular flow. Stepinski: We did that to fit inside the walls, and the idea was that deburr through final finish would be run by four people at any one time. Matties: Let's talk about the labor. I think a shop like this, producing this level of product, would typically take something like a 75–100 people. Labor is not really a factor in this equation. Stepinski: We have 17 people inclusive of all overhead, including myself. One of the things that clearly needed to be done was we needed to minimize the labor in order to get to that cost point. The labor we have is primarily focused on maintaining these systems in place. We have a very minimal amount of manual transactions and we have a very skilled labor force here. Matties: When did Whelen start? Stepinski: We started in the 1950s, in Connecticut. Matties: That's great. There's longevity here and it looks like they're willing to take some risks in their business. Stepinski: Yes, all of the processes that we ended up procuring and installing, all the feasibility testing for those processes was completed in that first six-week time period. We validated that every individual step would do what it needed to do as a portion of the whole project. The details and the alpha and beta testing were worked out later, but the feasibility testing was fit in up front to minimize the risk and to make sure that when I took the business plan to the CEO, we had enough confidence in that plan. Matties: Right, and when I say it was an empty shell, you had nothing in here. Stepinski: It was dirt. Matties: You guys put in all the plumbing, elec- trical, every component that you needed. Inte- grated Process Systems came in and it sounds like they were an important partner in this. Stepinski: Yes, they got about a third of the project and they contributed the in-line auto- FeATure WHELEN ENGINEERING REDUCES CyCLE TIME By BUILDING A NEW AUTOMATED PCB FACTORy Detail of custom piping.