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Language of Electronics: Enabling Customer Success in Manufacturing

With market demands and expectations constantly and quickly evolving, every organization should take the time to look inward and evaluate the level of satisfaction it provides to its customers. At Orbotech West, we went through this process in 2017. With the aim of improving our performance and the value of our solutions and services, we leveraged constructive customer feedback and self-reflection to refocus our mindset. Since then, the company’s shift to customer-centric programs has received very positive feedback.

We’re now kicking off a series of commentaries from domain experts to provide customers and others with knowledge and tips for maximizing the value of manufacturing systems—more customer-centric communication to provide a technical foundation for excellence. As a global company that sees a wide variety of customer successes and challenges across many types of segments, markets, facilities, and manufacturing systems, sharing knowledge for our customers’ benefit is an integral part of our culture.

Before we begin the series, I’d like to reflect here on a few examples of the programs we implemented to make customers more successful, as well as the results of those programs.

Regional Focus and Expert Team

Orbotech West realigned its organization to have a regional focus by establishing teams under the leadership of regional managers to provide the best support and service possible to our customers. These teams include senior engineers in a variety of technologies. In addition, we formed a top-notch expert team comprised of our top specialists in each product line and technology. The experts team also led complex escalations to become better partners and provide direct communication with our R&D teams worldwide. As much as I’d like to say we never encounter problems, there are always issues. It’s better to be readily available to provide solutions quickly, effectively, and locally. Improved technical support ensures customers are getting the most value and best performance from Orbotech systems.

The Monitoring Center

As a way of shifting our customer service from reactive to proactive, Orbotech now offers a monitoring center that aims not to only collect and monitor open issues reported by our customers, but also to anticipate customer service needs and flag performance issues to customers who have selected to participate. Through proactive analysis of performance parameters, Orbotech can, in some cases, predict future service needs ahead of time and make the necessary arrangements before a failure or issue arises. This reduces customer downtime and improves customer productivity.

Bringing Knowledge to the Field

A simple but very effective means of better serving customers is to share more knowledge, more frequently. To do this, Orbotech West implemented seminars across the region—10–12 per year—for customers to learn how to get more out of their Orbotech solutions, and to learn about industry trends. Such seminars are a two-way street: They also give the Orbotech team the opportunity to learn from our customers, better understand their everyday challenges, and then bring that back to the office for consideration in designing our future solutions. As a result, we are always fine-tuning our seminar content and structure to better serve customers’ needs.

Flexible Service Offerings

Orbotech customers’ feedback to us included the need for additional flexibility in our service contracts, so we gladly listened and implemented new options. By creating very flexible, customizable service offerings, we provide customers exactly what they need, enabling them to select a tailored package.

The Results

The results of our shift toward customer-centric programs are most noticeable in one of our industry’s most valuable performance indicators: mean time between failures (MTBF). Following the implementation of various new programs, we saw customer systems experience a tremendous improvement in MTBF—as much as 35% in some platforms—which positively impact the overall customer experience with our systems and service.

Looking Ahead

As I mentioned, this series of columns will serve as one more way for customers and others to benefit from our expertise. Keep an eye out for future columns on transitioning to directly imaged solder mask, choosing a laser direct imaging system, maximizing the value of inkjet printers, and more.

Sharon Cohen is president of Orbotech West.