Factory Visit (01 Mar 05)

Went to my supplier factory in Malaysia (Tampoi) yesterday. Was a fruitful and eye-opening experience for me. It’s the first time I see how the whole process for the production of the set top box (that’s one of the products my company sells) is done. We went through the various assembly lines, big automated machines punching away, actually they are inserting those small little capacitors, ICs, chips etc into the PCB board itself, then go through the “oven” where the nickel portion is melted and the capacitors etc are “sealed” into the PCB board itself. There is this pungent smell (smell of nickel I was told) in the air and I wonder how the workers survive there the whole day. Then come the manual installing of the PCB boards into the “box” itself. Each worker is assigned a specific job scope and everyone knows exactly what they are doing… some install the PCB boards into the set top box, then screw them tight.. then pass on the next person who will do something else (such as labeling etc) and then someone else along the line will test the box to make sure all the buttons work, the finished unit can pick up signals & sounds from the satellite, and then finally to the packaging portion, where there will be some wrapping the box with plastic, some inserting the manuals, some packing the remote controls, antennas and some doing the container for the finished unit… and then finally loaded onto the wooden pallets for shrink-wrapping and delivery afterwards. Before I visited the factory, I had sort of something in mind as the above whole process, sometimes we see glimpses of such production process in TV shows … but when I see it with my own eyes, its like for real and so interesting. Now that I’ve seen and understood, the next time when my supplier said some things, I would know what they meant, previously I would be unable to put a “picture” to it…. but now I would be able to ! Praise God ! I never imagined I would have the opportunity to visit such factories… but I did ! And praise God for it. Daddy is so good…..