The Benefits of Coming Together to Form a Global Reach

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Retallick: For Electronic Solutions, yes. The home base is in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Goldman: And the manufacturing of chemicals?

Retallick: For Electronics Solutions we manufacture globally.  We like to keep manufacturing as close to our customer base as possible. Specifically in the U.S. we manufacture in West Haven, Connecticut, Maple Plain, Minnesota, and Ferndale, Michigan. Then, of course, globally, we have a footprint everywhere—one here in Germany, several manufacturing facilities in China, Taiwan, Singapore, UK and Italy. I’m sure I’m leaving some out. This is the result of having four companies come together.

Goldman: I suppose complementing the manufacturing at all those facilities is service people available very close to customers then?

Retallick: Right. The other thing we're proud of is what we call our regional GDACs, which stands for global development and application centers. We can develop products in every region of the world. We have eight GDAC centers globally, including Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Germany. The focus of GDAC is to have a simulated plating environment where we can bring customers in and demonstrate a process.  GDAC provides the opportunity for R&D and applications specialists to go directly to where the customers are and offer that next stage of development close to where the product is going to be used.

Goldman: I'm sure that works very well.

Retallick: It does.

Goldman: Is Alpha Assembly Solutions also at all of these locations? They're different from the other three obviously, being more assembly focused. Are they at the same GDACs, or do they have their own centers, or how does that work?

Retallick: Their home base is in New Jersey. At this point in time, they're of course fully integrated into the entire organization; even though they run almost independently from a business perspective, we have tons of overlap in technology and supply chain selling.

Goldman: Right, because it's just different. Alpha Assembly Solutions is solder paste and preforms, things like that. So you need different service people and obviously the manufacturing is very different. Are those products also manufactured in many locations?

Retallick: Yes, they are. In fact, I've been to some of their facilities. The Electronics Materials group is responsible for the leadframe package industry; we engage with Alpha Assembly with their die attach adhesives. I’ve been to their facility in Singapore which is close to our customers that manufacture semiconductor leadframe packages.

Goldman: So, you're the go-between.

Retallick: I guess you could say in the Electronics Materials business we see collaborative opportunities with Alpha Assembly. It's critical that we begin to do more of this collaboration too. That's what we're trying to accomplish: a seamless organization where we can learn from each other and provide solutions to each other that we then can bring to the customer as a unified organization.

Goldman: Well, this was very nice. Thank you very much for your time and the pretzel. I really appreciate it.

Retallick: Thanks, Patty. Always a pleasure. Can I offer you another pretzel?

Goldman: You bet!

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