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With machine installs somewhere in the range of 500 new annually and award-winning customer and field service, Koh Young has a commanding perspective on the evaluation, purchase, and installation processes for new equipment. We spoke with Mitchell Kim, applications engineer manager; Brent Fischthal, senior manager of Americas marketing and regional sales; and David Nemeth, Koh Young’s service manager for the U.S. and Canada, on what they see as the best practices for acquiring the right capital equipment.
Nolan Johnson: As experts in designing, manufacturing, selling, and servicing capital equipment for PCB manufacturing, what’s your best advice for customers? How should they move from the decision to purchase a piece of equipment to installing it?
Mitchell Kim: The biggest thing that customers need to oversee is having dedicated resources to implement these systems. People are shorthanded as is, but that kind of planning really benefits any system. You need to have qualified personnel and resources to be part of the implementation process, so that should get developed early on. From there, you move into internal screening and try to keep information flowing internally so that the process can be sustainable.
Johnson: On the application side, how often is Koh Young involved in guiding a customer through what they need to do?
Kim: Most of the time, the decision-making process is taking place on the front end. Afterward, there’s a follow-up on the process improvement side, because after the purchase, there’s a phase of installation and training that’s along the lines of, “Just how do I utilize the system?” From there you can move to the bigger picture; you take that training and you apply it from a process improvement standpoint.
This is an excerpt of the interview that originally appears in the February 2023 issue of SMT007 Magazine. Click here to continue.
