By Tom Gilchrist, Vice President & COO

Over the past several years, Bauer has adopted a standardized process to manage the design and building of customer test equipment. The process is used to estabish a project plan for every custom equipment project and has evolved, and continues to evolve, as new lessons and customer requirements are encountered. Having a standardized project management process is great, it allows us to learn from our experiences and ensure that the knowledge is leveraged on future projects. From the beginning we have been focused on incorporating the customer's special requirements into our project management plan. Our project kick-off agenda is peppered with questions pointed at the sales and technical people looking for definitive answers to questions intended to highlight special requirements, customer concerns or expectations.

The objective of our business is much more than to provide custom test equipment to our customers. We strive to provide the tools and systems that our customers need to succeed. Beyond test capability and reliability, each of our customers has objectives for our equipment and the system of which it is part. Our goal at the beginning of a project is to understand these objectives to the best of our ability and to incorporate activities into our project plan that will help the customer obtain their objectives and lead to success.

The goal for every project manager at Bauer is to exceed the customer's expectations. Seeking a thorough understanding of the expectations is the foundation of the effort we put into establishing a project plan.

These expectations cover the range of component test capability, floor plan, work flow, instrumentation, communication, and component usage requirements, to name just a few.

From the project management perspective, some of the activities that we build into a project plan may include the following:

• Multiple Web Based Design Reviews to enhance communication and understanding between our technical teams
• Site Visits by our engineers to get a first-hand understanding of the customer's work flow, instrument preferences, ...
• Customized communication protocol, including additional customer personnel or project detail as required by the customer's organization
• A Program management approach when a customer has multiple items on order

When you think about it, it doesn't take a large leap of logic to see that a customer that needs a custom test stand might need custom project management. We address these needs much like we do the design of the equipment. We factor in lessons learned as much as possible and seek to understand what the customer's objectives are. As always, I'm looking forward to working closely with our customers in the future and learning about their business goals and how we can help them achieve these goals.