Working with our customers
A couple of years ago, I had a customer tell me that the project they did with us was the best work of his career. Of course, I liked hearing that, but it took a little while to understand why he said that. To me, it wasn’t too challenging of a project…from a technical point of view. We acquired SEM images and X-ray spectra from cross-section FIB cuts and from the surface of the samples. We collected some Raman spectra and AFM images. None of the data collection was terribly complicated or challenging. Then it hit me why this was such a good project. We collected all this data, and made it make sense together. We formulated a series of ideas further refining them until we hit on what the major contributing root cause was. We had our “ah ha” moment!!
From my perspective as part of a commercial analytical lab, we were an integral component or our customer’s effort. We helped to devise a plan, we conducted the experiments, we worked with the customer to understand the data and we met at the customer’s site to present the data, results, and theory as to what was happening. Ultimately, they found that a vendor of some of their raw materials wasn’t meeting the spec that was required. Our customer bought a piece of equipment that remedied the problem and found their yield sky rocket. As their CEO pointed out, they wanted to find the solution to the 80% yield problem and that is what we did. Indeed, that was a great project in which to be a partner.