Mastering Operational Excellence and Customer Partnerships in EMS with Worthington Assembly CTO Chris Denney

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Hello, I'm Philip Stoughton, I'm at Apex 2024 and I'm on the booth of CoYoung.
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I'm joined by Chris from Worthington Assembly.
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Chris, thanks for joining me.
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You're the CTO, so we're going to get a little bit technical, but first of all, let's start by introducing Worthington Assembly to anybody that doesn't know the company.
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Sure, we're a small contract manufacturer in New England about 40 people and we focus on quick turn and prototype runs, small volume, a lot of medical devices.
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We really like that industry and we're a strong technical team Everybody who works for us.
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They're really well trained.
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They're really focused on understanding what they do and being really good at it.
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So we spend a lot of time getting our staff like to the point where we can really put a lot of faith and trust in them, and we think that reflects pretty well in the products we deliver.
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Our customers really appreciate that the people who are building their stuff really know what they're doing.
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Yeah, that's really important in terms of technology.
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When you look at your client base, are they mainly in the local area or is it within a sort of limited geography?
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No, actually we ship all over the world, all over the United States.
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We ship to Australia even.
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We have some customers in Europe and the UK.
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But obviously I would say a pretty good majority is in the New England area, but we do ship all over the world.
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And you talk about that technical excellence, and you talk about having very well-trained staff.
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Do you think that's one of the key elements that your customers are looking for when they're seeking a contract manufacturer for these products?
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I don't know that it's necessarily something they're looking for right away, but I think it's something they come to appreciate eventually.
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Maybe they've been burned before and then when they find a place like us and they see the technical excellence of our staff, they're happy to see it and willing to pay a bit of a premium.
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It's not cheap to manufacture electronics in New England, but they find the value in it and they become a good customer.
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It doesn't fit everybody.
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It doesn't fit everybody, but the customers who keep coming back.
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It seems to work for them.
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Yeah, and when you look at that, does that relate to where you sit within the product lifecycle Like?
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Are you getting involved in the design phase all the way through to end of life, or do some companies like to try and pin you in just to the PCBA part of the business, because the more you can do?
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the more you can add value.
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That's right, yeah, so usually the way that it gets started is you know, they're already designing their boards.
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They may already have a contract manufacturer that they've been working with, Maybe they're looking to second source, something like that.
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And then oftentimes we start to give them some pointers and we say, hey, you know, if you tidied up this or you change that, things would go so much easier.
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And then they've not gotten that feedback before and all of a sudden they are and they're saying, wow, this is really great.
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And we start we're able to grow those customers by, like just showing them that, hey, we actually kind of know what we're doing, you know.
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Yeah, yeah, I think one of the things that's really interesting about the contract manufacturing industry generally is that you know the industry started as pretty much built to print, so you get a box of components and you get some bare boards, throw these components on the boards and bring them back to us, and it's kind of expanded in both directions along the supply chain and there is that sense that if, if an oem will put faith in the contract manufacturing industry and hand everything over to you, you can deliver so much more for them because you can get that right from design and that impacts on what the board costs, the components that they need all the way through to the end of life.
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Do you see customers understanding that or is that, as you say, something they come to understand once they've seen it and felt?
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it Exactly.
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They tend to come to understand it.
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Eventually.
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We have one customer.
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They actually have their own SMT line, they do their own circuit board assembly, we do their overflow work and when they first came to us and they were showing us, you know, this is how we build things and this is how we do things.
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We're looking at it, going how long have you guys been building?
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We help them with that kind of a thing.
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It's, it's, and then it's way more.
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Now, hey guys, we're coming up with rev three of this product.
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Can can we talk about the design?
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And they'll we'll do a screen share and they'll show us what they're working on, what they're changing or what they're trying to do, and we'll tell them like, yeah, this is great, everything's great, just change this one little thing.
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Cause they've learned now they they've it really well themselves the first time for the most part, but maybe there's just one little change that we know will improve the manufacturability of the product.
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So, yeah, so eventually they don't know it right away, but they come to learn it over time yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
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And it's not just, it's not just about the, the technical side of the design, it's also about the supply chain.
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How much, how much thought is given to obsolescence about, you know, challenges with respect to supply chain, how you might be able to fit a different, alternative component if you need to, yeah, so you know, largely I'm going to be involved a lot in like how do we build it.
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I'm going to be less than me personally.
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I'm going to be less involved in the supply chain side of things.
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When does something go end of life?
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But typically I get involved when something does go end of life.
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Now it's an emergency.
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Now what do we do about it?
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Right, but because we've done it for a lot of customers, we tend to be able to know like, don't worry, we have this, here's what we can do about it, here's how we can address it.
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And it ends up going pretty smooth.
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Most of these manufacturers, if they're end of life in a product, they've already got a path on how you can transition to a new product, and so we just call the manufacturer, we talk to them maybe a three-way call with our customer and we smooth it out and it ends up being fine.
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We're at Apex.
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You've been here for a day and a half as CTO.
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It's your job to go and find some new toys.
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What have you seen?
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that's excited you.
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You know we spend I was just looking at our numbers we spent almost an entire employee's time last year depaneling circuit boards.
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I know this sounds crazy, right?
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So you think SMT machines, new stencil printers, aoi everybody talks AI and all these great new technologies, but it's like you know how much time we spend just depaneling boards.
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And so we're really looking for automation because it's just so difficult to hire.
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The region that we're in is largely a machining town.
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Right the area that we're in, there's a lot of machine shops CNC milling, grinding, these kinds of things and they can pay pretty well.
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So for us to hire operators and technicians to do this kind of work is quite challenging for us.
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So we're really having to find more and more ways to automate stuff.
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So that's something I'm really interested in seeing.
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I've seen some promising equipment here and I'm hoping to look at some more before the end of the show yeah, and when you look at that talent issue, obviously you talked earlier about training and the importance of that and you know you train people, get them the right jobs, you're going to retain them.
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Recruiting is clearly a challenge.
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Do you see automation as a route to grow without necessarily growing your workforce?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, it's the only thing we can do.
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It's the only thing we can do.
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There's not enough people to choose from.
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You can bring five, six people in for an interview.
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You can't hire them all.
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They don't all, they're not all the right fit.
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You might get one out of five, one out of six, and so when you already have a small pool and the only people that fit is maybe one out of five in that small pool, you got to look to automation to be able to continue to deliver to your customers.
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Otherwise, your customers are growing and we can't grow with them.
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They're going to go somewhere else.
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Some of that software automation as well as hardware automation.
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's constant.
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It's constant.
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It's a little bit of Finding vendors here at the show that can provide solutions, a little bit of building it ourselves.
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Ideally, we would prefer to buy it as much as possible.
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Some of it doesn't exist that we really want to do, so we have to build some of it ourselves.
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We've got some talented people to help us with that.
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But yeah, software, when you talk about lean manufacturing, lean manufacturing is not just how can we get the part on the board as efficiently as possible, it's everything that leads up to the point where the parts come in the building too.
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So, yeah, you've got to integrate software into your lean manufacturing journey.
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Yeah, and you've got to take that holistic approach.
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You mentioned AI.
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Five years ago, everybody had Industry 4.0 on their booth.
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Today, everybody's got AI.
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Everybody's got.
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AI on their booth.
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Is there anything that is really delivering with AI, or is it a waiting game and figuring out where the potential?
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savings are.
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That's a really great question.
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I think the AI experts in this world aren't quite sure what to use it for yet.
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Right when we're seeing it is.
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We're talking about software.
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It's obvious the first use case for AI is going to be in software.
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How can they apply that to other digital manufacturing tools?
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So, for example, an AOI machine, for example, or an SPI machine?
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That is a digital manufacturing tool.
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It's not doing any physical changes to the product, it's taking pictures manufacturing tool.
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It's not doing any physical changes to the product, it's taking pictures.
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How can AI, which is natively digital, apply itself to AOI and SPI?
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I think I kind of see that as being the first place where it's going to have an impact.
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And that's kind of like what I'm keeping my eye on and trying to see if somebody's making some big strides there.
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Do I see it yet?
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I haven't seen it yet, but I I have to imagine it's around the corner because using you know, using llms and chat, gpt and co-pilot things like that myself you just it's.
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It blows me away how powerful it is and how can we use that to some of this stuff?
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It's got to be possible.
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It's got to be possible, it's got to be possible and and I think, like you say, that that co-pilot relationship with ai is really important really well-trained staff, you can um, you can actually make their jobs more interesting and actually leverage ai for them to become more productive.
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And that's the, you know, that's the smart way to do it, the, the.
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The idea is not necessarily to reduce your workforce, but it's to grow your business without necessarily increasing your workforce at the same rate I You'll be able to pay them more.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I want to give you the opportunity to plug your own podcast, Pick Place Podcast.
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Tell me a bit about that and tell me how long you've been doing it and what kind of topics you're covering.
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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The topic is as simple as how does a conveyor work?
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Why do manufacturers use conveyors?
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Because we're finding, before COVID, we would do a lot of tours.
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We would bring people in junior engineers, college students and we would show them this is what manufacturing looks like, this is how a circuit board gets built, and when they got to see those kinds of things, it informed their design decisions and they became better designers.
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It reduced the cost of building products for their companies, right, and then COVID hit no more tours, so we decided to start to do the podcast during COVID 2020.
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And again, how do you explain something like a stencil printer over an audio only medium?
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It was tricky to figure out how to do that.
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We don't have the budget to do video and to be recording and editing all these things, so we like to talk about the whole manufacturing process.
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We bring in industry experts to talk about maybe a particular thing.
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We had IPC, we had John Mitchell, dr John W Mitchell, on our show, and the whole goal is to try to educate people on, or educate engineers on, the manufacturing process.
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What we're finding, though, is that a lot of people in the manufacturing industry have really latched onto it and enjoyed it.
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So when they do new hires, they're telling people hey, listen to these episodes of this podcast and you'll it'll bring you up to speed much quicker.
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And we're doing the same thing with our own employees.
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When we have new hires, we say, hey, listen to these, these episodes, you'll understand our whole process so much faster, rather than take you a couple years before you get a holistic idea of how how a circuit board gets built, you can learn it a lot quicker.
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So it's, it's been great.
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We did a meet up here at the show.
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It was a lot of fun.
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We're hoping to do some more next year, but, um, yeah, I'm, I'm having fun with it.
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It's not a uh, it's not something I'm spending a ton of time on, but we're seeing some interest and I'm glad it exists.
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Yeah, no, it sounds like you're enjoying it.
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It sounds like it is a nice communication tool internally, it's a nice communication tool externally and it's turning into a training resource that you can use as well.
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So really valuable.
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We'll put a connection in the show notes, but it's Pick Place Podcast.
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They can just search for that on Spotify or wherever they get their podcasts.
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Absolutely, Chris.
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Thanks for talking to me.
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Always a pleasure.
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We'll chat again soon.
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Thanks for having me, Thank you.