Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/713934
68 The PCB Design Magazine • August 2016 in today's ever-compet- itive world, schedules are always being com- pressed. So, therefore, designers need to put in more than eight- or a ten-hour shifts all the time. At some point, if you truly ran it around the clock, you're go- ing to get some dimin- ished hours. To be hon- est with you, we've seen that around 20 hours is what's productive. I don't care how you work it, or where you work it—you're going to get about 20 hours. I've seen people actually send designs all over the globe, but you're not getting eight hours of fresh blood from three people. You're getting two hours of lost communication, and it's watered down. When you put two people to work next to each other, understand how they work, have a similar methodology, and a slight overlap in their schedules, the communication is stronger, and the overall productivity tends to be better. I value my designers' personal lives, so I'm eager that they do what they need to do. There's an old expression, "Would you die on that hill?" Every engineer wants you to die on the hill of completing their circuit, and I don't want to sacrifice any of my designers, because then they won't be there for the next time that engineer comes back. I value them, and the way I protect them is giving them a backup, and they train one another, and they work together. Matties: What do you think the greatest challenge is for a design service center today? Creeden: For a design service center today, the biggest challenge for me is taking care of the designers. If I do that, OK. And I take care of my customers, and I will develop them, and that development and that teamwork shows up in my customers' satisfaction. Why are they satis- fied? They want a quality board, they want it on time, they want it within budget, and the simple rule is, an engineer wants to go back to the last place they got a good board designed, so that creates the re- peat business. But tak- ing care of the design- ers, in my opinion, is our biggest challenge. Matties: How do you do that? Is it the environ- ment, the tools? I under- stand it's a combination of all these factors… Creeden: It truly is, and it's esteeming them. The sentence that we use within our corporate culture is, "You'll either view the designer as a liability or an asset," and in many corporations, they're viewed as a lia- bility. "What can I get out of them?" Whereas, I think, "What can I give them?" I want them to have the best software, the best hardware, a good environment, and be non-competitive with their fellow workers. Why should they be competing against one another if they're on the same team? That's a different philosophy than what's being done elsewhere. Matties: It's interesting. I've talked to Managing Editor Andy Shaughnessy about the way everyone is always talking about DFM and all of the other "design fors." I said, "Andy, shouldn't we be talk- ing about design for profitability, of DFP?" Because profit starts right here with the design, and if you design it right, you help increase the revenue or the value of the product, which increases the profit. Creeden: Along that line, I hope designers have the opportunity to take the DFX curriculum that IPC offers. I'm giving a little shameless plug for them because it's very well done. When you say "DFX," most people think you're saying "design for X," X being whatever, and I challenged IPC, because it's much more than "design for." It's "development for" assembly, fabrication, test, environment, all those different things. It's re- ally a development thing; it's much more than design. But when you teach the Certified In- terconnect Designer (CID) program, one of the main principles that we try to communicate at the very beginning is that quality will produce MIKE CREEDEN: CARE AND TRAINING OF YOUR DESIGNERS