Getting Clear About Certification With Charlie Capers

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Walk through the entrance at Zentech Dallas and you’ll see a wall of certification plaques prominently displayed. Beyond being impressive and a point of pride, these certifications tell a story to potential customers: This company is ready to do business. Charlie Capers, former vice president and general manager, shares his insights on quantifying the ROI of certifications. You may not see it on paper, but it’s definitely there. He also talks about his expectations for new hires and shares a case study about the importance of collaborating with your PCB designers.

Barry Matties: Charlie, it was impressive to walk through the Dallas facility and see all those certifications. How has Zentech fit those into the business model? How does Zentech quantify that as an ROI?

Charlie Capers: As an employer, certifications are a prerequisite for our technicians who want to work on hand soldering and reworking printed circuit boards. We want to know that they have the skill level necessary to do the rework, the touch-up, or whatever it may be, per the spec, and that they have the skill and the knowledge to do it correctly.

If they don't have those specific certifications before we hire them, we’ll give them a live test to see whether they can actually do what they say they can. If they qualify and we hire them, they'll do the testing, get the certification, and then get their name up on the wall for our next round of certifications, which is usually biannual.

It is pretty impressive, like you said, when you have all those certifications hanging on the wall and you bring a customer through. They know you're serious about what you're doing. The other part is regarding our work with our aerospace and defense customers, where it’s a prerequisite to start a quote.

It’s hard to quantify a direct ROI, but when you're getting awards based on your certifications and you can complete the work according to the spec, there’s a return on the investment—you just might not see it directly on paper.

The certification process is about skill level, so you see it in yield and throughput, but there are many other soft measures. Also, quality people trained on those specs know to refer to them, and what’s good or bad. When you ship out a product, it has to adhere to the specs called out on the drawings.

Matties: I also noticed the training aspect. Obviously, you're outsourcing through some certified trainers, but you had internal trainers as well.

Capers: We have a certified IPC trainer who teaches IPC-A-600 in-house. Having that person on staff is a big cost saving, and it’s part of a quality manager's job to provide that in-house training.

For the J-standard itself, we subcontract because it's more complicated with all the training modules. We also determine who needs which module because not everybody in the facility, for example, needs to have the space addendum training. You just need a few key people for that. As a base, we would like everyone on the shop floor to at least have Module 1 of IPC-A-600, which is the very basic module.

To continue reading this interview, which originally published in the July 2024 SMT007 Magazine, click here.