A Monkey and AT&S

This evening we got to visit AT&S, a circuit board manufacturer. It was interesting to see this plant, and especially the machines that they use to make the circuit boards. Technology today is booming everywhere, and it’s about time that everyone realizes this. Friedman defines it as the triple convergence, and from that he wants us to understand that technology is what is going to level the paying field, and as Carly Fiorina says “technology will literally transform every aspect of business, every aspect of life and every aspect of society.” Now seeing these really cool machines at AT&S was amazing to see how one can manipulate a language of technology to do what it wants, and for it to produce something like circuit boards with little human involvement is simply amazing! I just could not believe how clean this place was too… all the factories we have visited have been awfully clean to my surprise. I thought that conditions would be much worse, but I was very wrong about that. As far as AT&S, many of their systems are computerized and there is no requirement for much manual human labor except to run the machine and make sure the circuit boards are made correctly. Because of this technology, their error rates are kept low, and it reminds me of Six Sigma practices. The best part at AT&S besides all the machines was of course, the random monkey in the yard!