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Learning With Leo: The Study of Listening

For a long time, I thought a consultant was supposed to be the expert in the room. That was my model of the job for years. I can remember wondering how somebody relatively young could know enough to walk into an experienced organization and tell it what it should be doing differently.

Four decades later, I have a different answer, and most of what changed my mind has come from the work we do at EPTAC. Between the classroom and the consulting side of the business, I end up in a lot of plants. The companies that call us are rarely short on expertise. They have engineers, quality people, and operators who have been running the same line for 15 years. What they are usually short on is a clear picture of their own problem.

What I have learned is that technical knowledge and experience are certainly important, and you cannot do this work without them. But what usually decides whether a consulting visit is worth anything is the ability to listen.

What is the customer telling me, and more importantly, why are they telling me that particular thing?

The people working inside a plant almost always know where their problem is. They may not know the root cause, and they may not know the fix, but they live with it every day. They know which board comes back, which station slows the line down, and who gets blamed for it. If you listen long enough, ask the right questions, and walk the process, the real problem usually surfaces on its own.

The job after that is organizing what you heard, breaking it into manageable pieces, finding the cause, and building something the customer can actually act on.

Listening Is More Than Hearing

Asking what is wrong rarely gets you there. You get a one-line answer and a defect code.

Effective consulting depends on the ability to ask the right questions in the right way. Yes-or-no questions give you almost nothing. You want an explanation: what is happening, why the people on the floor believe it is happening, and what conditions surround it.

On a typical visit, I am asking things like:

• What is the equipment doing?
• What is happening within the manufacturing environment?
• When did the problem begin?
• Is the cost of manufacturing increasing?
• Are defects reducing production throughput?
• Are customer complaints increasing?
• Are operators following an established process?
• Do employees understand why the process requirements exist?
• Do they need additional training, technical information, experience, or management support?

These questions begin to establish the complete picture, and none of that is aimed at finding out who made the mistake. I am trying to understand the interactions among people, materials, equipment, processes, standards, and the manufacturing environment. Manufacturing problems rarely live inside one of those. They live in between.

Turning What You Heard Into a Technical Requirement
Once the problem is identified, technical knowledge matters enormously. You have to translate what you learned by listening to engineering and manufacturing terms: drawings, process instructions, customer requirements, industry standards, equipment capability, inspection criteria, and the actual condition of the product in front of you.

My experience with EPTAC’s professional services has reinforced that belief more than anything else I have done. Two jobs make the point.

A drone manufacturer came to us needing more capacity in their manufacturing operations. They had already diagnosed it themselves. The log jam was in their manual soldering process, so that is what they wanted evaluated.

Part of the answer was right there. You add capacity by putting more people on the line or by automating it. Their floor space limited how many people they could add, so that option was out, and we recommended automation. But the board itself was not laid out for a high-volume automated process and would have to be redesigned first. They agreed to both. It was estimated that the redesign and the automated process would increase capacity by more than 30%.

They came to us with a soldering question. A good part of the answer turned out to be sitting in the board layout.

The second was a medical equipment manufacturer evaluating new materials and processes to improve yield and throughput. You couldn’t answer that from a datasheet. It had to be answered on their line, with their product, their equipment, and their people, so that is where we started.

What came out of it reached well past materials:

• Optimize the process
• Standardize the inspection criteria between the operators and the inspectors so both groups are working to the same thing
• Build solder training around tool usage
• Evaluate soldering iron tip configurations for heat transfer
• Follow up collaboratively with pilot improvement trials rather than handing over a report and leaving

Incorporating these recommendations would reduce scrap, increase yield by 20-30%, and improve customer satisfaction.

Both jobs went well, and both customers got what they came for. What I take from them is the same lesson. The question a customer arrives with is a good place to start and a poor place to finish. That is the difference between correcting a defect and solving a problem.

Where Standards Fit, and Where They Do Not

Industry standards give all of us a common technical language. They define design principles, manufacturing expectations, inspection criteria, and workmanship requirements. What they don’t do is replace engineering judgment. You still have to understand what the requirement says, why it exists, and how it applies to this product in this manufacturing environment.

In electronics, product requirements vary considerably with application, reliability expectation, materials, board construction, component technology, manufacturing process, and end-use environment. Very little of it is universal.

So, asking, “What does IPC require?” is the wrong question. A better series of questions is, “What requirement applies to this product, why does it apply, what manufacturing condition are we trying to control, and what evidence demonstrates that the process is capable of meeting that requirement?”

That’s the conversation we end up having in almost every class I teach at EPTAC.

Most of It Comes Back to Training

Nearly every manufacturing problem I have worked on has a training component somewhere inside it. Operators may know what they have been instructed to do without understanding why they are doing it. Engineers may establish design requirements without fully understanding the manufacturing process. Inspectors may recognize a defect but not the process condition that created it. Every group is doing its job correctly, and the product still fails.

Effective training connects these groups. Personnel need to understand the relationship:

When employees understand where their work fits into that larger system, they start catching problems early, when they are still cheap to fix. Most of the training we build at EPTAC exists to close exactly that gap.

Some corrective actions are relatively easy, from clarifying a work instruction to training an operator to properly defining an inspection requirement. Others require management involvement, new equipment, revised engineering rules, a production schedule that makes room for training, a supplier changing a fabrication process, or additional testing to demonstrate reliability.

That is why the last part of this job is translation. Management needs enough technical information to understand not only what needs to change, but also why the change is necessary and what the cost of doing nothing may be. A finding that never reaches that form does not get funded, and a finding that does not get funded does not fix anything.

Putting It Together
So, how do you take information from operators, engineers, inspectors, management, customers, equipment, manufacturing data, and industry standards, and organize it well enough to take the pain out of a manufacturing problem?

It begins with listening to the people who work with the product. Ask questions that require an explanation rather than a simple answer. Observe the equipment and the manufacturing environment. Review the applicable engineering and industry requirements. Separate the symptoms from the cause, then break the problem into pieces small enough to act on.

Technical consulting in electronics manufacturing is therefore not simply the application of expert knowledge. It is the combination of listening, questioning, observation, technical knowledge, standards, training, and practical problem-solving.

I do not walk into a plant and tell the customer what the problem is. I listen until I understand it. The technical work starts after that. Keep studying, keep learning, and share what you know.

Leo Lambert is the VP and technical director at EPTAC Corporation.