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88 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 cycle time reduction, so we customize it. It's not up to us to tell them; we'll educate them and say, "Look, you have to also look at au- tomation, at people, and cycle time." Every- thing's included. We'll customize a solution, that's where we'll lead them. It's not magic, we create customized solutions for every cus- tomer, but that's how we earn new business. It's custom for them. Some people love the ACA-4 chemistry con- troller that does everything for them. Another customer says, "No, I just want your local guy to show up every morning, do my titration and I'm good. What's better than that?" Cullen: When we think about what is the best possible cycle time, we take the innovation team and design products that plate at a faster speed and with less downtime, the analyses are more optimized. We also need to think about cycle time in real production, meaning how do we respond to customer demands? What hap - pens if they have a problem? That's the service aspect, so again, it is innovation and service. The innovators try to design things that work best in full capacity production. The service team tries to keep our customers at their tar- geted capacity, and this gives them the ability to turn around that part quickly, so that's what we try to do when we design the chemistry in our labs. For a lot of our global customers, when we're trying to show the value proposition of our products, we include the cost of, for exam- ple, a piece of plating equipment that produc- es some nominal number of boards per hour, and we amortize that cost in our calculators to show what the cost contribution should be, but in North America, with the lower capacity utilization, it's different. How many parts get through the plating line depends on the qual- ity of the plater, the ability to service it, and the ability to make it work in the most efficient manner. The more our process engineers make the North American fabricators more efficient will depend, in part, on how well we can inno- vate and service. Matties: It's an exciting time for you guys and the industry. Kenney: I think so. For us, it's going to be excit- ing. It's going to be a lot of work. We started today by saying we were busy. We haven't done much yet. But Platform has made some acquisi- tions and then the work will really start for us. Matties: The other challenge, of course, will be the cultural integration between these groups. Kenney: It's always the biggest challenge. Matties: How do you overcome that? Kenney: I'm not 100% sure. I can tell you one thing, at MacDermid we do have a tangible culture. I told you, I'm the newest guy here at 17 years. Our culture is pretty ingrained. I flourished in it and I love it. Today we talked a lot today about business; we didn't talk a lot about people. My #1 job next year, if these ac- quisitions go through, will be managing people. How do I get all of the employees as motivated as our existing MacDermid people? CyCLE TIME REDUCTION FOR DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL CUSTOMERS FeATure inTervieW