Catching up with Gardien’s Rick Meraw

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Meraw: Because we have developed a proprietary IT system called OnTrack to ensure we deliver on the promise. OnTrack is an in-house developed ERP solution that was written from the ground up to manage PCB quality assurance; we leverage it extensively throughout the entire Gardien Group. The system is broken down into a number of modules: cam, test and AVI. There’s also one for planning, costing, KPI reporting, training, quality, maintenance and even sales. In effect, these modules make up an entire business ecosystem and everyone in our group, around the world, is trained in the application of these modules.

Beaulieu: So by having everyone work on the same system you can have everyone work in the same way, to the same standard

Meraw: Exactly; our internal goal here is that we should be able to take an employee from any of our facilities, place them in another Gardien operation, and they can hit the ground running. The processing of jobs should be uniformly consistent, as should any associated data entry. The only thing that might be a little different is that OnTrack may be in a different language, since it is a multilingual system.

Beaulieu: I can see how it makes for a lean and efficient operation. What benefits do your customers get?

Meraw: We believe it delivers significant benefits to our customers, particularly those operating multiple facilities or cross-border operations. They are assured of consistent quality and data.

Beaulieu: Please tell me more about data collection. What are you doing with that?

Meraw: At a customer level we can provide information such as KPI dashboards tailored to our clients’ needs. Obviously, many of our clients operate their own ERP systems, but what we offer is information from an alternative viewpoint—a fresh set of eyes, if you will. The OnTrack system is built for one very specific purpose, PCB quality assurance, so all its outputs are centered on that. We can generate reports on specification conformity, certification, and job yield histories; for our American clients, it even handles things like ITAR compliance.

Beaulieu: What do you mean by job yield histories?

Meraw: If the client has previously fabricated the same PCBs, we compare the job with historical first pass yield rates so that we can quickly alert them to any potential process variations.

Beaulieu: Given that you have so many operations and you must be capturing significant amounts of quality related data, do you think the information is useful at an industry level?

Meraw: That’s something we are striving toward—being able to track quality trends that are happening in the industry all over the world. We also use the information to improve the quality of service we offer. Lessons learned in one service center are collated so that we can apply the knowledge in other markets.  As an example, we capture numerous data points around any RMAs that we encounter and enter this into a knowledge base. If we see a similar issue elsewhere we have the experience to work towards a solution.

Beaulieu: This is truly “dent making” stuff, but I’m just a marketing guy, so let’s slow down a bit and tackle this one thing at a time: First of all, you are arriving at global quality assurance by using OnTrack, which is a system made up of specific PCB quality assurance modules. Your use of this makes it possible to apply the same system principles to all of your installations, thus providing solid, consistent, reliable and repeatable processes with every single company you work with no matter where in the world they are.

Meraw: That’s exactly right.

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