How a simple question forever altered my perspective.

In 1985, fresh out of graduate school, I worked as a manufacturing engineer for GE Aerospace. One day, my manager asked me an important question that shaped how I performed my job in electronics manufacturing.

It was a Friday afternoon. The hourly workforce I supported had left for the weekend. I had paperwork to complete when the boss came into my cubicle on the shop floor. My manager had more years with the company than I had been alive. You name it; he had seen it and done it. We spoke of the work accomplished during that week and next week’s goals. Then, he hit me with this question:

“Lee, who are your customers?”

As a newly minted engineer, I rattled off the programs we supported at the time. “Sonar programs like SQR-19, SQS-53 and BSY-2. The TPS-59 radar program,” I replied. Those were the programs for which we built circuits cards and cabinets. At the time, various program managers had come into our shop, exhorting the workforce to meet production requirements.

My boss smiled, nodded his head and said, “Very good.” Then he asked, “Lee, who are your customers?”

Now I was stumped. I saw my career going down the drain. I named the largest programs we worked on and whiffed on the answer.  Gloom and doom was on the horizon. I felt the crosshairs of a missile heading my way. I was dead meat.

He leaned back in his chair, smiled, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Your customers are these 30 operators on the shop floor. If you design the perfect process and they don’t have confidence in it, the process will fail. You can automate the process completely, but if the technicians don’t buy into it, we never will meet our production and quality goals.”

He went on. “If we don’t meet our production and quality goals, we won’t get new business. So the first order of business of a manufacturing engineer is to provide operators and technicians the tools they need to get the job done right the first time, on time and under budget.” A radical thought, this young and impressionable engineer realized. As time progressed and I gained experience, I began to realize that what my old boss said was true.

Years later, I performed a Pb-free soldering audit for a Fortune 100 company building electronics for the aerospace market. I was performing the audit because the manufacturer wanted to know whether it had the manufacturing process infrastructure to support Pb-free soldering in case it was prematurely compelled to do so by its customers.

One operator was attempting to perform hand soldering with SAC305. She hated the stuff, using several choice words to describe the solder (many of which I muttered myself when first working with the material several years ago). I suggested using a hot plate to preheat the board. The manufacturing engineer swore up and down, “That will never work. It will take too long. We will never supply the shop with hot plates.” Of course, he said this in front of several operators, his manager and the program manager who hired us.

Thermalcouple and meter in hand, I sat next to the operator. I measured the temperature of the board. When it rose above 100°C within five minutes, I told her to try hand soldering again. And sure enough, the solder wetted to the board easily. The operator saw she could solder with SAC305, with a little help from a friendly neighborhood hot plate. It turns out she could use the same soldering techniques and fluxes with SAC305 as she had been taught with SnPb. I had seen this before with other customers.

This confession is not about the process intricacies between SnPb and SAC305. It is a reminder that with any new process initiatives the most important variable manufacturing engineers face is ensuring the operators and technicians believe in the processes we develop, no matter how automated. An operator who has confidence in the process will not only produce quality hardware, but will be aware of the process variables when something goes wrong.

Safety is another important issue.  No one wants an operator or technician to suffer an on-the-job injury, and no one wants to pollute the environment. On this issue, failure is not an option.

If operators and technicians are safe, and have confidence in the process, they will build quality hardware on time and under budget, meeting their customers’ requirements. And if something goes wrong – and it will – you want the operators and technicians to understand the process so corrective action can be quickly implemented without impacting quality or production schedules. Thus, the manufacturing engineer’s first customers are the operators and technicians they support.

Somewhere, my old boss is looking down at us smiling. We’ve learned our lessons well.


Lee Whiteman has spent more than 25 years manufacturing and engineering high-reliability electronics, and is a Six Sigma Green Belt; leewhiteman.com.