Smaller inspection firms find a niche
Steve Scheiber, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 2/1/2007 2:00:00 AM
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Don Miller President and Co-founder YESTech Courtesy of YESTech |
The printed-circuit-board inspection industry is dominated by a handful of major competitors that get most of the attention. Smaller companies cannot establish an identity in the marketplace simply by being like the “big boys.” Instead, they have to offer features and capabilities, service and support, or price advantages that set them apart.
YESTech in San Clemente, CA, epitomizes this “can do” attitude. I recently discussed the challenges facing smaller firms with Don Miller, the company’s president and co-founder.
Q: How does your approach to the marketplace differ from that of your competitors?
A: We try to look at the inspection task from the point of view of the customer. If the technology we offer doesn’t meet the customer’s needs, then it can’t be the right solution. If all we do is mirror the offerings from the industry leaders, then the customer has no incentive to choose us instead.
Q: Do you plan to continue to develop both automated optical inspection (AOI) and x-ray products?
A: Some of our competitors believe in a healthy growth of automated x-ray inspection (AXI). They have much more modest expectations about AOI. Our AOI lines have been very successful, and we are applying what we have learned to our more recent entry into x-ray inspection.
Q: What do you do differently?
A: More than anything else, we try to make our systems user-friendly and adoption-ready so that people can get them up and running on the manufacturing line quickly and easily. For example, we provide a visual front end that users find more intuitive for designing an inspection regimen than they find wrestling with conventional programming code to be. As a result, our inspection systems offer advantages to contract manufacturers and others where high-mix, product changeover, and program creation are the gating items. We expect operators to be able to create a complete inspection program in 30 min—a far cry from the days of work that a code-based program often requires.
Q: How do you achieve such fast results?
A: We start with a standard device-package library to simplify training and ensure program portability across manufacturing lines. We also rely on PCs and other technologies that users are already familiar with.
Q: What other advantages do you offer?
A: It often filters down to price, but if you look more closely, it is our flexibility. We can provide custom software solutions or honor other requests on the turn of a dime. I can do in a couple of staff days what takes the big guys months. We stand out in front of the curve, anticipating our customers’ needs. We are not tied to our own intellectual property or standard systems. Big companies get patents. We provide other services.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: For one thing, we are looking to expand geographically. We’re a relatively new company, founded only in 2002. Until now, we have concentrated most of our efforts in North America. But the emerging and fastest growth markets are in India and China and elsewhere in Asia. We’ve done well there with manual x-ray systems, but we are only now beginning to expand into automated x-ray. We also plan to expand further into high-volume applications. As our company grows, we become better able to take proper advantage of these enormous opportunities.
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