Circuits Assembly - November 2008 - (Page 34)

Value-Add Service Supporting Full-Service Customer Requirements at the Regional EMS Level By Jeff Roberts Greater traceability and complex builds means more staff. Or does it? traceability requires both technological expertise and a business strategy that focuses on reducing hidden costs and leveraging outside resources. The Technology Strategy At Clover Electronics, the technology strategy needed to address three areas: • Minimize the need for unique engineering overhead requirements. • Meet customer requirements for specific services such as detailed traceability and quality reporting. • Rapidly address any manufacturing issues that arose on the floor. As mentioned, regional EMS providers must offer a full range of service and expertise without creating excessive overhead expense. At regional revenue levels, it can be cost-prohibitive to have a full-time process engineering staff capable of providing all the answers in paste deposition or thermal profiling that may be required by that company’s 30 or more customers. One way to address this issue is to supplement internal staff with strategic alliances that fill the gaps. Second, automating key points in process monitoring permits fast development of robust processes and makes it easy for technicians and production operators to handle a portion of what has traditionally been an engineering workload. n Jeff Roberts is president of Clover Electronics (cloverelectronics.com); jroberts@cloverelectronics.com. Ed.: For the rest of this article, please see circuitsassembly.com/cms/ content/view/7313. O EMs increasingly want to see greater levels of value-added support from their EMS providers, regardless of size. This is particularly true of highly regulated industries such as medical, automotive, avionics, homeland security and defense where field failure analysis activities may require information related to assembly process parameters. Furthermore, the transition to RoHS-compliant manufacturing is driving a need for better process traceability to support OEM studies of the impact of new processes on long-term product reliability. For the regional EMS provider, this presents an interesting challenge. How can technologically complex customer requirements be met while maintaining an overhead structure commensurate with a smaller business footprint? For Clover Electronics, the answer has been to develop a strategy that uses a combination of factory automation and strategic supplier alliances to address customer requirements without significantly adding to overhead cost. The fact that most OEMs have fully embraced the idea that all their EMS providers should be full partners in manufacturing is actually a positive development that enables all levels of EMS firms to increase the percentage of value-add contributed to a project and contribute to improved product manufacturability and quality. Also, greater codependency drives longer-term relationships, which can be costeffective for both parties. Meeting these customer needs for competitive cost, high quality and excellent 34 Circuits Assembly NOVEMBER 2008 circuitsassembly.com http://www.cloverelectronics.com http://www.circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/7313 http://www.circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/7313 http://www.circuitsassembly.com

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

Circuits Assembly - November 2008 Contents Caveat Lector Industry News Market Watch Talking Heads Focus on Business On the Forefront Screen Printing Better Manufacturing RoHS Conversion for Medical Devices Supporting Full-Service Customer Requirements at the Regional EMS Level Speed Thrills Tech Tips Wave Soldering Process Doctor Pb-Free Lessons Learned The Defects Database Getting Lean Materials World Product Spotlight Ad Index Assembly Insider Technical Abstracts

Circuits Assembly - November 2008

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