Circuits Assembly - July 2008 - (Page 14)

NEWS People Asymtek promoted Chris Brown to regional sales manager, United Kingdom and Ireland, responsible for new business opportunities and the region’s sales distribution network. He was EFD’s European business development manager for automated equipment and has extensive experience in the medical and fuel cell industries, and will represent both Asymtek and EFD. Essemtec named Florian Schildein marketing manager. He was marketing manager at a punch parts supplier, and studied public management with focus on marketing at Potsdam University. EMS firm Axiom Manufacturing Services named Mike Jones quality manager and Simon Crewe supply chain manager. Jones has a degree in electrical and electronic engineering and 25 years’ experience in the sector. Crewe has 15 years’ experience in supply-chain management, most recently with an international automotive company. Indium promoted Damian Santhanasamy to senior technical engineer. He joined the company in January 2006 as a technical engineer for Asia-Pacific and has a degree in electrical and electronics from Institut Teknologi Negeri, Malaysia. R&D Circuits named Michael W. Bivens to its account management team, with direct sales responsibilities in the Mountain States region. Motorola promoted Dan Moloney, head of its home networks mobility business, to also oversee Motorola Labs, the company’s research group. He replaces Rich Nottenburg, Motorola’s chief strategy and technology officer, who resigned. Eurotherm named Steve Blomquist president of Eurotherm USA. SM: We’re looking at where all the manufacturing sites or demands for materials are and basically moved factories globally according to demand. So it’s optimization of the manufacturing footprint, optimization of anorexic manufacturing, trying to reduce raw material costs, and putting supply chain management philosophies [into practice], basically optimizing supply chain globally, not just locally. MH: Is anyone here from the purchasing department? Is it safe yet? (Laughter) The bottom line is the margins are tight, so you survive by trying to find new opportunities. You can’t sit still; you have to listen to people, talk to people and find [the opportunities]. They’re out there, and we’ve found a few. And each of us has to find one or two that will help our companies, and this is the way you build it. Then you find a couple more. You keep focusing on trying to find those niches. If everybody’s going into military and aerospace right now, maybe that’s not the best thing to do if you’re a small manufacturer just setting out in the process. But perhaps there are some other opportunities where someone is not looking – like medical, or even, if things are coming back to North America, consumer electronics. One of the fallacies is so many of these large corporations have gone from technology providers to marketers: Hewlett-Packard, Apple, a lot of these big companies, and the reality is you have to understand the means of production. There are things like embedded components where you’ll embed actives and passives. This is all being done in production in Japan. These are enabling technologies to build new products, but you have to know about them; you have to know how to build them if you’re going to be successful. Read the journals, find out what's happening around the world and look for those opportunities. What are some of the things you have focused on to improve margins? SM: Our company has adjusted the compensation program. Since we’re a design engineering company, what we’re doing is giving all engineers the opportunity to earn more money based on a number of different factors congruent with the direction we’re trying to go: billable hours, useful time and capturing hours that normally would slip through the cracks. If you can focus on what’s important to the company, everybody wins. The company is more prosperous and the employee ends up sharing in that. We’ve looked at increasing training. I find it’s very important to learn about new things and invest in your career by rubbing elbows with the people who know something you don’t, or opening your eyes to different things. All that is helpful in improving your company’s future, if you can improve your own knowledge as well. LA: At Qual-Pro, we’ve had successful growth over the past several years, and we’ve really started to focus on getting back to Lean manufacturing. We’ve invested time training all our staff and working on continuous improvement. We feel that through this investment, not only through the manufacturing floor, but in the office area, we’ve improved our time tremendously. We take orders and cut that in half to be able to communicate back to the customer quickly. We’re working with our customers to train them on how to do events themselves, so we can work together. – Chelsey Drysdale Industry LG, Haier May Bid for GE Appliances Unit FAIRFIELD, CT – LG Electronics and Haier Group have been cited as potential buyers of General Electric’s appliances unit, according to GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt, say published reports. However, the firms aren’t speaking on the record. Immelt also named Mexico’s Controladora Mabe, Sweden’s Electrolux and Turkey’s Arcelik as possible bidders, and mentioned a potential GE “spinoff.” The division could draw offers of $3 billion to $8 billion, say analysts at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. GE (geappliances.com) had appliance sales of $13.3 billion last year. LG (lg.com) says it has not made a decision to bid for the GE unit. The company is “carefully monitoring” the sale of GE’s appliances division, said CEO Nam Yong. Haier (haier.com) spokesperson Zhao Rui declined to comment, say published reports. If Haier were to obtain the division, it would mark another successful acquisition by a Chinese OEM of a major US brand. In 2005, Lenovo (lenovo.com) bought IBM’s PC division. LG reported sales of $11.3 billion in 2007 from appliances. North America accounted for 29% of the division’s first-quarter sales. Haier is expected to generate $1.4 billion in revenue this year. – Chelsey Drysdale 14 Circuits Assembly JULY 2008 circuitsassembly.com http://geappliances.com http://lg.com http://haier.com http://lenovo.com http://circuitsassembly.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Circuits Assembly - July 2008

Circuits Assembly - July 2008 Contents Caveat Lector Industry News Market Watch Talking Heads Focus on Business Global Sourcing On the Forefront Screen Printing Tech Tips Will Electronics Follow the Sun? ‘Warm’ Manufacturing Heats Up Reputation Trumps Recession, China ‘Web Circuits’ A Novel Non-VOC Conformal Coating Krypton: Benchmarking Customer Satisfaction 2008-09 CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY Buyers Guide Wave Soldering Pb-Free Lessons Learned Process Doctor Materials World SMTA Int'l Product Preview Ad Index Assembly Insider Technical Abstracts

Circuits Assembly - July 2008

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