Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
FEBRUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 17 Johnson: Being where we're at in the process, our challenge has a lot to do with how familiar is our customer with the actual jobs we do. I've shared this story before. I grew up here in the Portland, Oregon, area in the '60s and early '70s, and that's when Tektronics employed 30,000 people and they manufactured every- thing in the Beaverton campus. Nuts and bolts, the ceramics to make the displays, they did everything on campus. And if you wanted to understand what was going on with a particu- lar project that was under development, it was my grandma's house for Sunday night dinner. Because my dad worked in the warehouse and then moved over to Electro Cam. My mom worked as a secretary watching what was going through procurement. My grandmother was an assembler. My uncle was an engineer. My aunt was another assembler. I mean, we had family members spread out through the departments of the company. And the status report on the product went around the table with the mashed potatoes. If we didn't have an answer there, just walk down the street because some neighbor actu- ally worked in the department you were look- ing for. If you were a designer and you wanted to know if this board was going to be manufac- turable, you walked across the street into the fab clan and talked to the guys there. That was how you did it. That's how you had all that knowledge inside your company so you could do that. As we streamlined and moved into the world we're in now, designers don't have that touch. They don't have that understanding of what's going on. They don't see it. They don't have the opportunity to figure out what goes on with that and work with the technology. So they end up sending stuff in that becomes unrealistic on the shop floor. And to answer your question Andy, the example I gave you with Eagle Har- bor was one of the craziest examples of that. Because we were ready to lose that customer. They thought that we just couldn't build what they were doing at all. What it became was an ongoing conversation to help them under- stand what they were doing that was going to be a problem for anybody, and to help bring up their sense of knowledge. Helping a team of theorists become engineers is really what was going on there. And it was an interesting con- versation for all of us. Education is a big part of this. Helping people understand, in this world, where the designers just do not know what's going on with the chemistry and the dynamics of that. One of the projects I've been working on the past couple of months is putting together a series of short videos that spends some time on each individual manufacturing step of the process at Sunstone. These are something we want to use to help do exactly what we learned with Eagle Harbor. We want to help all our customers be able to plug into the manufacturing steps. See it in action. Get a little information about what the context is, why the particular stuff is used, what we're doing, what that means to your board, and give some specs and some tolerances, and do all of that in 45 seconds. We're spending quite a bit of time to get this boiled down to the essence of it, so our customers can spend 10−11 minutes, watch the videos and at least get a sense of it. And then this goes right back to the comment that was made early in the whole conversation. I think getting a customer tour of your facility is an underrated milestone in the sales process, which is of course a challenge for those of us who specialize in no-touch. Beaulieu: I agree with that. Even more than a planned tour, I mean go back to the way things were done before. I know a number of We're spending quite a bit of time to get this boiled down to the essence of it, so our customers can spend 10−11 minutes, watch the videos and at least get a sense of it.