Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/599730
November 2015 • The PCB Design Magazine 19 GOOD IN, GOOD OuT: BAY AREA CIRCuITS DISCuSSES DATA STRATEGIES Garcia: That's the nice part about it, even going back to when we added Laser Direct Imaging. Everything is fabricated off the Gerber data and these machines are smart enough to produce perfect registration based off the data. We've be- come more reliant on the technology and less reliant on the human operator. Paper: It can be almost counterintuitive to think that we need to spend a lot of money in order to save money. It's sometimes hard for people to get over that mental hurdle, but that's exactly what we've done. We've invested a lot of mon- ey in equipment because we know it's going to pay off in the long run in terms of managing our overhead. Matties: And there's so much old equipment still in use in this industry that there's a lot of room for opportunity to improve. how much cycle time have you reduced by bringing in all those pro- cesses and bringing in the level of automation that you've already achieved? Garcia: I would say, depending on the job and technology, anywhere from 4–8 hours overall from start to finish, maybe even more. In terms of automation, our account managers used to manually enter everything. We had four or five different steps where that same dataset was be- ing entered for different areas of production. Now it's done just once. The automation also extends to accounting functions like customer invoicing and purchase order generation for our vendors. Matties: does your system automatically check stock for base materials and such? Garcia: We're working on that right now. We're hoping by the end of the year that process will be fully automated. Paper: We have automated the stock on the other end of the process, related to jobs we pro- duce. If there is a higher than anticipated yield, we have a stocking system. If a customer calls up and they're interested to know if we've got a particular part in stock, our account manag- ers or service representatives have real time ac- cess to that information. We know exactly how many pieces we have and exactly where it's stored. Matties: With all your drive to improve your au- tomation and your new technology, your com- petitors must be doing the same thing, i would imagine? Garcia: Yes, I imagine some are. Matties: they're headed in that direction if they want to stay in business. Because what happens is you accelerate, and they have to keep pace, right? how do you maintain your advantage? Garcia: We believe a lot of things we're working on and the way we've set our system up is quite different than a lot of our competitors; we have a uniquely custom implementation built from the ground up. The one big key is that we've really tailored it to what we feel is going to help us grow, and obviously it's always improving and we have to stay on top of that. We also be- feature interview