At GreenSource, Lean and Green Starts on the Front End

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Whelen Engineering’s board shop, GreenSource Fabrication, is set to go commercial at the end of the year. But GreenSource Vice President Alex Stepinski has set his sights high from the start.

The Charlestown, New Hampshire, facility may be the board shop of the future. GreenSource is the first new captive shop in American in decades and one of the first waste-free board shops as well. It’s almost a “no-touch” operation. The CAM engineers all work remotely, and they can launch a job without ever entering the facility.

I spoke with JanNell Taylor and Andy Schilloff, who work at the CAM office in New York. We discussed what it’s like working for a company that plays by its own rules, and what the front-end engineers are doing to get ready for the day that GreenSource officially goes commercial.

Andy Shaughnessy: JanNell, can you and Andy give us a little background about yourselves?

JanNell Taylor: Sure. I am currently the global product engineering manager for GreenSource Fabrication. I've been in the PCB industry since 1972. My last employer was Sanmina, and I was there for almost 20 years. I was the front-end engineering manager for the past seven years I spent there.

Shaughnessy: Did you knew Alex Stepinski when you were with Sanmina?

Taylor: I actually worked for Alex. That's how I was brought into this project when he first opened Whelen.

Andy Schilloff: I also have prior experience working with Alex at the new product introduction (NPI) group at Sanmina a little over 10 years ago.

Taylor: Andy and I met while we were working at Sanmina. Andy worked in the NPI group, and I was in front-end engineering. Andy also worked at Sanmina in other positions, including in the front-end for a while.

Schilloff: I have experienced both process and product engineering over a long period of time, which helped me be effective in the NPI group. I've also had experience working for i3 Electronics most recently for a little over two and a half years, and Alex has been building up the crew here to move forward with everything that's happening at GreenSource, and he asked me to come on board. It was definitely the thing to do.

Taylor: In this office, we have eight CAM and product engineering personnel. There is also a customer service rep and sales manager located here. We have three people in Phoenix, and we’re currently adding three more. We're also going to be adding another person to the New York office. We'll have 15 total CAM product engineer personnel working remotely.

To read this entire article, which appeared in the October 2018 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.