By Mike Kadlec, V.P. Sales & Marketing,
Data Circuit Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA

Facing the worst recession in the history of electronics, manufacturers in the CEM and PCB fabrication sectors are retrenching – closing, consolidating, reorganizing. In the face of this negative business activity, Data Circuit Systems has gone ahead with expansion plans – hitting the recession head-on, investing in capital equipment, advanced technology, and human resources.

The investment plan fortifies the company’s strategy to provide OEMs and CEMs with advanced tactical engineering and fabrication solutions on demand for the bare PC boards that they need and in the time-frames and quantities that will make their businesses work.

Founded in 1978, Data Circuit Systems, Inc. is privately held and has 145 employees. Like everyone else, the company has felt the effect of the economic forces to striking the electronics industry, but in the face of this, the company’s revenues have declined substantially less than the industry trend. DCS’ strategic commitment to NPI and related engineering solutions is but part of the key to its economic buoyancy.

Critical Factors
The critical factors contributing to sustained operations, profitability, and uninterrupted service to customers can be found in capital reinvestment and the corporation’s culture and its commitment to human resources. The later will be discussed here.

Printed circuit board fabrication is a very special kind of manufacturing-intensive business. With literally hundred of process options, the typical manufacturing floor is anything but organized, linear, or continuous in its workflow. In addition, most companies have to overcome the logistics of sequential processing in multiple buildings that may be spread across entire cities, or in some cases, entire continents.

Some offshore full-scale production facilities manage to circumvent this problem, but even there, with state-of-the-art process automation and panel conveyance, continuous flow manufacturing is still impossible. Every bare board relies on operator nuance and engineering skills, subject to “touch points” and back and forth shuttling of product between departments. Basically, fabricators large and small look and feel very much as they did 20 years ago, with the addition of some new bells and whistles.

As a result then, even the best process equipment is useless without well-trained and disciplined operators. Even more important is the fab company’s commitment to a culture that recruits, trains, nourishes, motivates, rewards, and sustains those operators.

Because of the merchant mentality of the fabrication sector, employees generally come and go with the ebb and flow of the almighty wage tide. Outside of the need for more money, poor management and weak corporate culture are primary factors for changing jobs. In turn, there is a direct correlation to lack of corporate continuity, which impacts throughput, repeatability, customer service and cost of quality. Introduce the worst recession in memory to the mix, and the resulting reorganizations and “right sizings” have produced a staggering turnover, which can only hurt the board fabricators. The outcome is price erosion mania, for survival’s sake, which has become the strategy for almost every fabricator in North America and many offshore plants as well. This has not been the case at DCS, where the team building began nearly 25 years ago. Our team members have been recruited over time the way a championship football team recruits star players with an eye firmly fixed on going to the Super Bowl. The company qualifies and recruits winners, and provides the mental and physical work environment for professional growth and personal success. Other sustaining components of this longevity “recipe” are found in training, education, empowerment, compensation, improved tools, and employee benefits. Significant investment in these areas is required to maintain a competitive edge. Over time the company’s associates have become its greatest assets and this directly contribute to a return on that investment in the form of process consistency, throughput, cost of quality, repeatability, fiscal prudence, and of course, unbridled enthusiasm.

Add to this very substantial new capital investment, and we have assured ourselves at DCS that we have in place the process tools, automation, and systems integration to meet the technical challenges presented by today’s electronics industry. Central to this is the sense of family and esprit de corps stemming from a positive corporate culture that motivates a unified team to bring these tools to bear. The average tenure at Data Circuit Systems is 10 years, with numerous employees having been with the company for more than 17 to 23 years. The team at DCS has been to the Super Bowl and back and is vital to the company’s success no matter what the business climate.