Viking Test Services: Much More than Test

Estimated reading time: 28 minutes

Matties: Are you actually manufacturing wet processing equipment yourself?

Kelly: No, we don't and we wouldn't be able to. There's no point in us trying to do that here in the UK. The costs are too high and we've got our Asian partners that can make a considerably better machine than us for a considerably better price.

Matties: Because what I'm hearing first and foremost is you're a sales and distribution company.

Kelly: I like to think that we're more of a partner company to our customers.

Matties: Which would be the service aspect of what you provide.

Kelly: Yeah, but kind of a little bit more than that as well. We often get asked general advice of how to do something. Because, like I said, we're not just a sales guy sitting in a front room. The people that work for us and most of our engineers have come from the PCB industry so they understand the process.

Now to give an example, we've got a customer in Europe and he came to us a while ago because he wanted to buy an AOI. He came to the UK, he saw the AOI that we sell at another one of our customers, he liked it, the price was right, the product was right, and he bought it. When we were installing the machine, he asked us to advise him and showed us his shop and said, "What about this etcher?" We looked at his etcher and said, "It's not very good, it doesn't have this, it doesn't have that, you could probably do a lot better." He said, "Well, could you come along with a design of a machine?" We offered him a Universal etcher and within a couple of weeks he bought it. Then he bought an exposure machine, and he's bought this and he's bought that.

He's come to be a very good customer of ours now. He's by no means the biggest in terms of revenue, but in terms of a trusted partner, he's almost like our perfect customer because there's trust both ways. It shows that we're not just a supply company to him, but we're part of his team, if you like, to look for the right machine and design to help his company grow and improve its quality.

Matties: I keyed in on ‘trusted partner;’ you built your company on the reputation of trust.

Kelly: That is it. Most of our sales now are second and third and fourth machine sales, and we wouldn't be getting those sales if the first machine hadn't gone in right and done what it's meant to do—and they don't always. We can't control absolutely everything; sometimes there might be a small quality issue or there might be something that happened in shipment, but we can only look after what we can, and I think we do a very good job in terms of that.

Matties: The real value is in the front-end of the relationship, where you can go in and help a partner design the best system or acquire the best system that meets their need and is the right budget.

Kelly: That is what it's about, because you have to understand the process of what he wants. It's very rare a customer will come to us and say, “Right, this is the drawing, this is the spec, please can I have one of those?” We need to understand the pre-process and the post process. For example, why have you got a problem with your stripper? Why does your current machine not strip out between these traps, what's the problem? Look at the problem before; you may not actually need a new machine here. Maybe if we look at the prior processes we can look at something…

Matties: And modify their process.

Kelly: Yeah. Sometimes we're doing ourselves out of a sale, but in the long run it's the right thing to do.

Matties: But you're building the trust and servicing the customer properly.

Kelly: You mentioned spindle repair, and we've done spindle repair for 10+ years now. The guys that do that have been repairing spindles and general engineering for nearly all of their lives, so we have an excellent spindle repair business. What makes it so strong is that we repair all types of spindles, from Westwind, Jaeger, Precise, PluraTech, and a whole range of others, and not just the common ones but all of the ones 20+ years old that are obsolete. Again, this is part of that trust. The little, small companies that have got this 20 year old drilling machine in it need somebody that's going to support them and fix that spindle. They can't afford to just go out and buy any spindle or, the worst option, buy a new drilling or routing machine.

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