He turned around Cypress Fab three. Okay, I have a Fab in Bloomington, Minnesota. It has a morale problem.
The numbers are going down. Im missing my quarter. So I call him up in Manila, he was in Manila, You need to come to Bloomington now, but Im just doing this. Im just getting my yield done. Im not sure I can leave
now. I said, Now. So he got on a flight and theres direct Manila to Bloomington Airport on Northwest Airlines. He got out of the airplane at 4:00 AM. He went to the plant at 4:00 AM, didnt go to a hotel and relax. He went to
the plant. He walked in with the workers, he always talks to workers, and, Who are you? Oh, Im the new etch guy.
So he walks
in and talks to them for a few hours. Later that day at the shift change, which is noon, all real manufacturing plants run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day and theyre organized in four shifts. Week, weekday, weeknight, weekend
day, weekend night. Thats the bad news, and those are 12-hour shifts. The good news is the workers on any shift work four days, one week and enjoy a three-day
weekend and they work three days the next week and enjoy a four-day weekend.
So the deal for them is,
Howd you like to work hours, get overtime and you get overtime past 40? And theres 40 built in. Its built in overtime, earn more money. And they have long weekends, then they all vote for it. Its very popular.
Thats the way plants and Silicon Valley run. Unfortunately the people you work with, your Fab contains people all over the United States and you have to call them. Somebody has to be on the phone. So were not going to get there, but just
remember, theres 24 hours on the clock and those are all opportunities for us. Ill come to that point later.
At noon, we had the shift change.
We had week and day and weekend night in one meeting. So we got to talk to half the company and he walks up on stage and they go, Isnt that the new etch guy? Whats he doing up there? And he said, No, hes your new
boss. Hes running the plant. Thats what this guy does. Hes helping you. I talk to him pretty much every day. Here he is in one of your conference rooms. He likes working with small groups so he can really interact with you,
using the whiteboard to work on. I dont know what this was.
So I got the call on Saturday night, worked the weekend and started there. He got the
call on Friday night and he came here and worked Saturday and Sunday. He likes being in a place on the weekend, see who comes in, talk to them, How come youre in here? How are things going? This is what he did. This is a report he
wrote to me and you can see its critical task learning, finalized daily revenue memo, finalized daily report, reports that everybody needs. So he is putting in infrastructure and it took off. So he came in here. You had the best week of the
quarter here and you broke through the run rate. If youd have had this run rate every day, youd have blown away this quarter, not missed it. So now we know it can get done. Theres nothing wrong with the product or the quality, we
just have to organize better.
And then you went and set another record the week after that and another record youre setting this week. This is
Friday so Im quite sure this week will be a record. We have to count the rest of today and tomorrow. Okay? And we know why things are better and Ill show you part of it, and we can maintain it and that thats the good news.
Its difficult to win when youre tired and youre looking up at this 8,000 foot mountain and somebody says, You have nine minutes to get to the top. You cant put out the effort, but when youre winning and you
see things happening right, then you can say, I can do that, and Ill show you what you have to do later.
Okay, chicken scratches. The
next thing I did was I dug into your Fab flow. So this is a computer document you have and this shows when an order comes in, goes to special things, goes through the different legs and comes out it, and each of these boxes is a step. So its
like in a Fab analogy, a machine comes into an etcher, gets etched, goes out of the etcher. Okay, my notes were this. First of all, this virtual Fab has the same organization and operating principles as a silicon Fab, and its not even... The
new silicon Fabs, you look down an aisle, youre looking at a 100 yards, no bodies, robots.