Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/582861
October 2015 • The PCB Magazine 83 they've got tighter line and space than they've ever had before, so they need some help figur- ing out how to build stuff for the first time. They lean on us like an extension of their engineering team. Like Don alluded to earlier, we have the right level of experience. It's a mat- ter of putting it in the right spot, getting a high- level meeting with a large fabricator and the right people from MacDermid. I've been here 17 years, so I know who the right people are to pull from, and how to get the right people in front of the right person at the customer—and we make things happen for them. When you do that, the customers immediately recognizes that value. We've had circumstances in the last two years where customers have all but given up on certain jobs they couldn't build. The yields were too bad, they just couldn't take the revenue. We've installed processes where they can now accept jobs they couldn't have taken last year. Matties: You're helping them add capability to their line card. Kenney: That is our goal. If we can do that, imagine the power of a supplier that can help you actually grow revenue, and do things you couldn't do last month. That makes us as valu- able as anyone else could possibly be in that pro- cess. That's our goal, and that will never change. If any one of my guys were here today, they'd tell you I preach to them all the time that our goal is to be as valuable as possible in the cus- tomers' supply chain. We have tech service en- gineers who are at the board shop so frequently, the employees think the MacDermid engineer is a member of their own company. They think they're like some high-level engineer from cor- porate that comes in when there's a problem. That's who they believe the MacDermid folks are, which is fine for me. At the fabricator level, I want our team to be part of that process. Matties: Part of their team. Kenney: Our goal, which was different than it was two or three years ago, is to be on the pro- cess improvement teams, part of them, on the team, collaborating on all processes, whether they're MacDermid, or it might be a competi- tive process, it doesn't matter. Matties: Because your value goes up. Kenney: It does, and eventually that always comes back to us. If we're in this for the long term, which we are, opportunities will come to us and they always have. Matties: It's interesting that you use the value analogy. In our business, PCB007, I always say that we need to be like electricity. You never consider living life without electricity, you never question the value. When the bill comes in, you don't say, "This is crap, turn it off." You just pay it, because the value is so high. It sounds like that's what you're trying to become—electricity. Kenney: Yeah, and it's interesting, because I try to be a student of business, and running a business in that model at our scale is difficult. We didn't have as many people, and we didn't have as many resources, but if you think about it, with the potential acquisitions that will take place, we're going to have significant scale and a lot more resources. It makes it easier for me to keep my promise. My promise to the customer base is, "We're going to be that influential to your process. Just give me time to make this work." The excitement around these new ac- quisitions is that we will now have the scale to deliver on those promises. We'll have more ex- CyCLE TIME REDUCTION FOR DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CUSTOMERS FeATure inTervieW