Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/582861
October 2015 • The PCB Magazine 87 days. You mentioned process engineering. Aside from capabilities, are the fabricators looking at reducing their process cycle time? Do you see that as something that's on their minds? Kenney: The best way I can get a meeting in North America is to tell someone I can help them shorten the cycle time, at any level. Matties: We recently did a survey on this very topic for our cycle time reduction issue that's coming up. We asked people how important it is. Surprisingly, I thought it would be number one, and it really wasn't. Kenney: Really? Matties: Some said, "Yes, it's very important." Others said, "Other things are more important." Then we asked, "How do they do it? Do they have a dedicated team?" Most of them don't. Then we asked, "What sort of title leads this effort?" Many didn't have a dedicated person. Cullen: Most of your responses were fabricators? Matties: Yeah, fabricator responses. Cullen: Some of the fabricators said it was im- portant, but even those who did didn't have a good plan in place or a dedicated person? Matties: A lot of them struggle to do it—to re- duce cycle time. Some of them were saying, "We leave it up to the operators." The truth of the matter is you can't leave it up to the operators. This has to be a top-down, really, that, we're go- ing to reduce cycle time by X percent, let's go make this happen; that's where we're going to bring in the suppliers. Because to me, there's so much waste in the processes. If you just look at one simple loader and unloader, which could be two people, but the amount of time that you can save just in yield and performance. It seems to me that you're also in the great position not just to help them increase capabil- ity, but to help them understand that cycle time is a big issue all the way through. If you're in the process engineering arena with them, I would think that these guys would be really looking for that. I'm surprised that there are people who just don't realize how valuable reducing cycle time is. Maybe it is lack of knowledge. Kenney: Absolutely, it is part of the problem with this North American space. I don't think there is a very good understanding of the direct correlation that one hour of production time is worth X dollars. Depending on who you talk to, that answer is vastly different. One of the strange things about this marketplace, which is good, is there are only 300 customers. You can get an intimate knowledge of everyone's really important needs, so we do as good a job as we can in understanding the differences between all of them. We don't lump them all together and say, "Everyone has the same needs for this." We just don't do it. It's almost a luxury where we can separate and say, "Okay, here's the 100 customer projects that we want to go after this year. What are the common needs there? Is there a common value proposition?" Whatever that is, you can start to dig into some detail with a smaller customer set, and get really specific. There may be a hundred of those that are very worried about cycle time. Half of them will have a whole different idea of how they want to go after it. Some are all into the automation space. The other half will say, "All I care about is plating time. If there's a reduction of plating time, that's my number one priority this year." Other people have dif- ferent ways they think they're going to get the CyCLE TIME REDUCTION FOR DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CUSTOMERS FeATure inTervieW research laboratory.