Rogers Corporation Keeps Materials Moving

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The I-Connect007 editorial team spoke with Roger Tushingham of Rogers Corporation about the company’s current priorities with everything that’s been changing recently, including his perspective on the distributing and manufacturing trends he sees as a global supplier.

Nolan Johnson: Roger, what’s your role at Rogers?

Roger Tushingham: I am the VP of marketing and new business development within our Advanced Connectivity Solutions Business Unit. I’ve been with Rogers for three and a half years. Before that, I spent 25 years in the semiconductor supply chain, both at equipment manufacturers and specialty chemical suppliers. My main responsibilities include looking at what the market needs are from an OEM perspective, making sure we have our portfolio positioned correctly, and looking at what we can be doing as the needs of our current customers and our future customers evolve; these needs may be beyond the PCB laminate business that we’re in now, and we want to satisfy those needs and ensure we have products that enable our customers to drive their technology roadmaps.

At Rogers, our short-term priorities have changed a little bit in the last three to four months, but the general strategic direction remains the same. Right now, our first priority is the safety and health of our people; it’s the guiding light in all the decisions we’re making. Our second priority is making sure we are not disrupting our customers’ supply chain, and we’ve been doing a lot of work in the past few years that has prepared and enabled us to minimize any disruption right now.

Our third priority is to continue to drive our development portfolio so that we continue to release products that are enabling our customers to drive their technology platforms as the needs of the end consumer get more sophisticated. There are three purposes: safety, minimizing supply chain disruption in these times, and driving our development portfolio, so we’re healthy for many years to come.

Johnson: Let’s start with safety, and then we’ll walk down the list.

Tushingham: As soon as the situation started to evolve with COVID-19, we implemented site pandemic response teams that report up to an enterprise-wide pandemic team with oversight by our executive team. Globally, each of our sites has a response team that implements safety measures such as remote working. We’ve been remote working since the middle of March, apart from our operational staff. We are designated as an essential business, so our operations teams are busy every day, working to meet customer demands. But non-site essential staff, meaning people who don’t have to be on-site, are not in the factories. For those people that are working in the factories, we were very quick to implement social-distancing policies. We shut down parts of our operations that required people to work next to each other immediately and then evaluated what PPE was needed and what precautions we could take before slowly reopening those areas once we deemed it to be safe to do so.

To read this entire interview, which appeared in the May 2020 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.