One Stop Micro

Consider this scenario: You are a micromachining service provider, and you have a loyal customer.

This customer has been with you for several years, but with intermittent orders, and wants to continue getting parts micromachined by you. The orders are not monetarily significant to your company. You as the provider have been doing it out of loyalty to the customer. And the customer has presumably been with you all these years out of loyalty (and at ease in his comfort zone). There were no returned parts in the history of this job because the customer had built in some redundancy. Although the initial set-up was time-consuming and complicated, running the job in production-mode got to being routine after the first few runs. Orders came in a few times a year. Each run took a few days to complete.

At what point do you re-evaluate the relationship?

1) Your costs have been going up.

2) Setup time after each equipment failure is becoming an issue.

3) People who initially ran the job are no longer around. Every time an engineer leaves, he has to train his replacement.

How much is loyalty worth?

Let us look at the unspoken (and un-analyzed) but subconscious aspects of loyalty. First of all, we need to distinguish and filter out the concepts of social activism (not buying animal tested products), social fidelity (as in a marriage) and fealty (no, not to the feudal lord, but I use the term loosely here in the context of allegiance to one’s country, friends or relatives). Once we do that, our analysis can be narrowed down to a significantly smaller set of human traits.

So what are these traits that contribute to loyalty? Pardon me when I state this in an oversimplified and cynical manner: In a free-market society, I ascribe loyalty partly to human weaknesses or drawbacks (for example: laziness, fear, job-security) and partly to non-rational thought-processes (for example: superstitions, why fix it when it ain’t broken, let’s not jinx this one). I don’t claim chivalry is dead, nor that people have become meaner.

Loyalty vs. Market driven Micromachining Process Development

Should market driven process/production be so bluntly money driven? I think not, because these human traits that I call weaknesses, drawbacks or irrational thinking are what makes us human. It is the grease that keeps societies functioning in an egalitarian manner, the glue that holds us all together- the examples we set for our children. May be we need to find a balance between self-interest, practicality, and our responsibilities. Too much grease and glue can make a real gooey mess, and too little of it will grind up things and make it all abrasive. Besides, it helps nobody to have a failed company.

My personal belief (or is it a weakness?) is that fair-dealings should precede cut-throat business practices. But don’t let your heart totally rule your mid. After all, we live in a market driven economy.

Obsolescence

Micromachining is a tough job. With the progression of time, equipment and processes get outdated to the point that it is simply easier to replace them rather than upgrade or refine. Band-aid solutions will get you only so far.

For example, motion control boards for stages used to have dedicated controllers (and of course, separate amplifiers). A few years back, these controllers became boards that were plugged into ISA slot. Then they became PCI slot cards. And now with the advent of multi-microprocessor based PC motherboards, these motion controller boards will become obsolete. Two things changed here: slot-types and board-types. Similarly, laser firing controllers (that were not integrated within motion controller boards) went from serial port to USB. You can hardly find a PC with a serial port or an ISA slot anymore.

Is it time to re-think your strategy on legacy jobs?