Inside Spirit Circuits

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Randall: At the moment we are heavily into the lighting customers.

Matties: A lot of LED with all that metal back?

Randall: Yeah. It's not all exclusively metal, but predominantly metal. If we looked at what our business is at with China, it’s a similar story. That's been the real growth and that's fueled our growth over the recent years. I would say we are a typical medium-sized PCB shop, with standard technology here in the UK. We invest in equipment that suits our model of many small batch runs such as the inkjet printing the component IDs instead of the conventional way of screen printing IDs onto the boards. For us, when you're doing 20+ jobs a day, producing 25 screens a day, and sometimes only printing three or four panels on that, it would be absolute nonsense.

Matties: The set-up is more than the actual process time.

Randall: Absolutely. We would be employing people making screens all day so it's a bit of nonsense. We've made those sorts of investments but elsewhere you'll see what you consider to be very traditional process equipment. It's not so much about the plant where we're different or the way we're producing the boards, it's more around the service that we provide and being able to respond quickly to new parts on short lead times, coupled with repeat volume parts that we source in China.

Matties: How many employees do you have on the manufacturing floor?

Randall: Actually dedicated to manufacturing, we have 35 people that are physically making boards.

Matties: Is this a high point in employees or where is this at?

Randall: It's not changed too much to be honest but what we have changed is our shift patterns. We operate basically 24 hours from 6:00am on Monday morning until 6:00pm on Friday. Part of that has come with demands for much shorter lead times; we're getting orders that are coming in on 24 hours, 48 hours and so on. We need that whole day to do that. The headcount has increased a little bit through acquisitions where we've obviously added people as part of that process. If we were here four or five years ago, we'd probably be looking at 30 directs.

Matties: Not a dramatic difference.

Randall: It doesn't fluctuate that greatly to be honest.

Matties: As the managing director of a shop like this, what's your greatest challenge?

Randall: The greatest challenge is making sure that everything stays maintained and is available for processing because with the lead times that we have we've got no fall back. We need to make sure that our process controls are correct, we need to make sure that preventative maintenance is being done, and we need to be looking after and loving our kit. Obviously we're heavily reliant on the skills of the people, as any business is, but for us, we need to make sure that we're looking after our tools and our kit because if we do have a failure or a breakdown we have virtually zero recovery time. I step aside a little bit in terms of the sales revenue part of the business. I'm reliant on the other guys doing their part to feed the shop. My job and the job of the guys here is to make it happen and obviously deliver in full and on time.

Matties: It's all about investing in the right technology too, right?

Randall: It is.

Matties: When you look at the investments that you're making, what drives your decisions?

Randall: For us here, a lot of it has been about flexibility and about being able to set up quickly and not waste materials. Talking about screen printing, if you look at that, it's an extremely wasteful process if you think about the amount of ink that is actually deposited onto the boards and the set-up times. There's some good stuff out there and there's some good technology that absolutely we would like to have, but as it stands at the moment, it's a case that we need to maximize what we've got and get the best out of what we've got. The cost of some of this kit, when you start talking about LDI equipment for example is huge.

Matties: Do you see Spirit moving to inkjet technology any time soon?

Randall: Not any time soon, no. I know the technology's there and I’m very interested in it.

Matties: It seems like that would be one area where you could really have some advantage in cycle time reduction.

Randall: I absolutely agree. It's on the watch list if you like, but as I said I don’t see that we'll be moving there any time soon—the investment is just too great.

Matties: The idea is that you have the boards ready when they need them?

Randall: We do have some stock holding agreements with certain customers as well. A lot of it is spot orders and we'll just ship direct, obviously, but we do have call off agreements with certain customers where we'll hold stock.

Matties: You have the Rescue Me Program as well?

Randall: Yeah. The idea basically is that we typically don't load for 100% yield. Let's take a simple example, if we have a customer requirement for 100 pieces, we may load 105. If we end up with 104 and scrap one, we've got four pieces that are then available. They go into the Rescue Me Program and they're immediately available at a discounted price. You can have all four, you can have one, you can have three, whatever you need.

Matties: How has that program been working? Do a lot of companies take advantage of that?

Randall: It's been very successful.

Matties:  Of course, being a quick-turn shop you have to maintain multiple lines for flexibility.

Randall: Yes, for example, we have a huge range of in-house final solderable finishes. We have both leaded and lead-free solder leveling. Then through the middle of the shop we have immersion silver and this line is our OSP, our organic line. We also have our ENIG process in the other part of the factory. We've got a good suite of basically everything we need. The only thing that we have to go outside and subcontract for is any thick or hard gold requirement. Everything else we can pretty much accommodate in-house.

Matties: You need to have all these finishes these days too, right? Especially in your environment with so many jobs.

Randall: We do. Particularly with LED lighting, OSP has become more popular. We still have some requirements for leaded solder, obviously the RoHS requirements came out many years ago, but there's still some exemptions and we still maintain the ability to provide a lead finish.

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