Jordan Mandel: The New Face of Totech North America

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Jordan Mandel, sales director in North America for Totech Europe, discusses his new role with the company as Rich Heimsch prepares to retire, explores the untapped potential of dry storage, and how Totech is working with OEMs and manufacturers to create solutions for their moisture control problems. Like the need to protect components from ESD, Mandel says we now see that same thing around moisture-sensitive devices.

Marcy LaRont: Jordan, it’s good to meet you. You’re new to Super Dry Totech. How did you get involved?

Jordan Mandel: Most people know Richard Heimsch, the face of Totech for North America. He has been running this business and building the brand the past 10-plus years. Rich and I caught up earlier this year and told me he wanted to retire, spend some time with his family, and get out on the course more. We discussed ways to continue building the brand and the product line he's been rolling out to the market here in America. I was given the opportunity to pick up where he'll be leaving off, and I’m pretty excited. It's an untapped market with a lot of opportunity to continue education about moisture management and control in electronics manufacturing, and also other applications in the medical and life sciences industries as well.

LaRont: Tell me about your background. Are you new to the electronics supply chain?

Mandel: This is a new venture. I've worked with manufacturers and channel partners in various industries. Most recently, I was leading global sales for plastics manufacturers to reduce the resin composition in the products they make. It was a really interesting role in providing sustainable packaging to the F&B market, the consumer goods market, and even consumer electronics.

LaRont: Sustainability is certainly a huge issue for us in every part of the supply chain, including final deliverables, and recycling and disposition of the materials. Tell me why you believe that dry storage is an untapped market.

Mandel: What I've seen is there's a necessity for storing components in dry storage containers. Historically, this has been done with nitrogen cabinets. The industry hasn't had experts creating custom solutions and working alongside manufacturers and engineers to understand what they need. It’s not just thinking, “I need to buy a cabinet,” but, "What are we doing and what are we storing? Are we looking at long- or short-term storage? Do we need to reset the floor life of our components?” We're taking a solutions-based and consultative approach, but still delivering incredible products. This will open many more doors and opportunities to work with manufacturers on a critical step to their processes outside of just the SMT assembly line, namely storage of materials.

LaRont: I noticed some of your compartments seem to be newer, and to have really fast drying times. Talk about cycle times for some of your products.

Mandel: Whenever I'm speaking with contract manufacturers and OEMs about their MSDs, one thing I always mention is that the most important metric on any cabinet is the recovery time. It’s what allows you to go in and out of that cabinet as many times as you need to, while still maintaining humidity less than 5%, or in some cases less than 1%.

LaRont: So, the second you open a cabinet, you potentially have a problem.

Mandel: I wouldn't say you have a problem, but you're creating a draft where ambient air in the factory air is getting into that cabinet and either raising the humidity profile or even changing the temperature profile of that atmosphere within the cabinet. So, if you're storing components and they need to be stored at 5% relative humidity when you open that door, you're possibly raising that cabinet to 10–20% relative humidity.

You can imagine how that could create downstream impacts. This can create some discrepancies between what's actually being done and what needs to be done.

LaRont: How quickly do your cabinets recover in that scenario?

Mandel: We have different cabinet lines. When you think about long-term storage—when someone only needs to access a couple times a day or a couple of times a week—those cabinets can have anywhere from a 15- to 30-minute recovery time, depending on how long that door's been open. But when we talk about high usage or high frequency of access, we have cabinets that have less than six-minute recovery times to get you below 1%. This is incredibly fast when you think about practical use. This is one of our more popular applications in the market.

LaRont: We spoke before and you mentioned some additional uses had come up for dry storage just because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Could you take us through some of the uses for cabinets? What are things we might not traditionally think of?

Mandel: There was a huge increase in the demand for point-of-care diagnostic kits during the pandemic, these at-home COVID test kits. Now, those are made where enzymes need to be stored, and that's what is reacting to the saliva, blood in the glucose or pregnancy tests. These enzymes need to be stored in dry chambers; they can't get wet during the process or they're ineffective. Then the test kit wouldn’t work or shouldn’t be shipped to market. There was a huge boom in the production of these test kits from COVID alone, and we've seen a huge increase in the need for dry storage cabinets. That was a direct impact on our business in an area we weren't particularly expecting but has proven to be a very interesting application outside of just consumer, defense, and automotive electronics manufacturers.

LaRont: That's nice to find a new market, especially when you're not necessarily looking for one.

Mandel: Yes, we were able to find a business purpose from that pandemic.

LaRont: As far as what you offer to the interconnect industry, what are some things you would like our OEMs and manufacturers to know that they could be better educated about?

Mandel: I'm noticing there's a lot more emphasis on moisture audits in the same way that ESD has been a huge topic of concern. You can't really see it, but it's there and we need to protect our components from this. We do have to have ESD-safe applications. The same thing is happening with moisture-sensitive devices. I always encourage everyone to really understand the products that are coming in and the components they're using in their SMT assembly process. What are the MSL levels? I frequently find they don’t know the MSL level of the components. That level is critical because it gives us, essentially, a clock on how long that component can remain outside its moisture barrier bag packaging, or dry cabinet before it becomes expired. By expired, I mean it has absorbed enough moisture that when you run it through your reflow oven, you could cause significant issues or deficiencies on the product, whether it's micro-cracks, popcorning, etc. These lead to intermittent failure or field failures and recalls. We see all these headlines about recalls on cars. Anytime there's a recall, it’s a very expensive process. What's the worst thing that could happen? How small is the problem? Often, we see that it starts with moisture management within the factory.

LaRont: I would imagine the ROI is fairly easy to calculate for your dry cabinets, given some of the potential problems that can arise from moisture.

Mandel: It's a significant ROI. But we know that manufacturers are really looking at yield enhancement. The first items that get signed off on will be something that can improve capacity to some degree. We're more of insurance, you could say, on what's being manufactured. I’ve learned a lot from Richard about changing the perception of dry storage, and the importance of educating customers at shows and in their facilities. We walk through and explain what's happening because they usually don't know.

LaRont: The educational piece is huge on all sides of our industry. You need the proactive and predictive and to make sure all your investments remain sound on the other side. Tell me about your expansion in the U.S. market.

Mandel: We’ve been here. We have cabinets all over the country, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean, but we’re focusing on how we differentiate ourselves and not only offer dry storage cabinets. We want to offer solutions. How do we help and consult to ensure that what we're delivering is the right product? How can we help these facilities grow and expand? We want to provide them with the most innovative and up-to-speed products and technologies.

We've put a lot of work into our software that powers all of the cabinets and can tie into an ERP or an MES so that manufacturers, managers, or any stakeholders in the business can see exactly what’s happening—on the floor or in the supply rooms—regarding the storage of the components. This could trigger alarms to say, "This door was left open" or "The cabinet’s not regenerating. How long have our components been stored at levels of humidity that are not acceptable?" We also provide records and audit trails for factories in case they need to provide those to their customers.

LaRont: The software piece of hard machinery is becoming more prevalent with many of the machinery suppliers we've been talking to. it's great to hear that you guys are working on that. That seems like a huge value-add to your product and the solutions you offer to the industry.

Mandel: One key element is our Pick By Light software. Looking at drying of components and storage of components in relation to the MSL levels of every individual reel, telling an engineer which reel or component is ready to be used, and which one needs to be stored a little bit longer because its floor life isn't fully reset. We’re providing some smart solutions to the engineers that will help reduce any sort of human error when you're processing components. I've seen assembled boards cost up to $100,000, where you have one component on there that pops that board, and that's pretty catastrophic from a cost perspective.

LaRont: Absolutely, definitely in line with Smart factories and Factory 4.0.

Mandel: Our team in Europe is doing a great job, actually working with some of the largest automotive manufacturers on automation in their facilities. That's something we're looking at bringing to the U.S. market as well.

LaRont: That is great to hear. Jordan, is there anything else you'd like to say?

Mandel: I'm looking forward to meeting everyone at the trade shows.

LaRont: Thank you so much for your time today.

Mandel: All right, thank you, Marcy.