'A vast production capability'.

Amid the many changes around Dover Technologies these days (see News, page 10) is the merging of several business units related to component assembly and placement into a new group called Unovis Solutions. Roland Heitmann, the former general manager of feeder equipment specialist Hover-Davis, has been named general manager of Unovis. He spoke with CIR-CUITS ASSEMBLY in early August.

CA: What can you tell us about Unovis?

RH: Unovis started operations on July 19, and was formed by merging the Advanced Semiconductor Assembly division, the Odd-form and Final Assembly division and the SMT Laboratory of Universal Instruments with the Direct Products division of Hover-Davis. Unovis will operate these divisions under one consistent business plan with clear strategies, objectives and measurements. Our mission is to bring together unique and comprehensive process and assembly solutions to meet electronic assembly challenges in the automotive, component assembly, telecommunications and medical markets. Unovis products and services will complement and enhance standard surface-mount equipment. We are differentiating ourselves through our extensive application, integration, and process knowledge and experience. We not only provide comprehensive assembly systems beyond the scope of traditional PCB assembly, but we assist customers in the design and optimization of their products and processes.

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CA: What were the reasons behind grouping the four units? Is there an obvious synergy or overlap?

RH: There clearly is no overlap but strong synergy. If you look at many of the new products currently being developed in our target markets, from SiPs to automotive sensors to advanced medical devices, they require a multitude of competencies to be combined in the development of comprehensive, high-yielding assembly solutions. Prior to forming Unovis, each of the four divisions addressed customers with their own piece of the puzzle. Often, it was left to the customer to assemble those pieces into a complete solution. At the same time, our customers are forced to become leaner, often with smaller staffs and less internal expertise than is necessary to implement and optimize their solutions.

By merging, we can offer something unique by bringing together their broad-based core competencies. To better support our customers, we can address their advancing applications. We can also offer a broad array of process and analytical services. We can be the one-stop shop for our customers, helping them design and optimize their products and processes for manufacture and reliability. As they develop their functionality, we can assist them in the manufacture of their initial samples. Ultimately, we can provide them with complete volume manufacturing solutions.

CA: Couldn't Universal already do this?

RH: It comes down to focus. Universal first and foremost is a surface-mount and insertion-mount vendor. Their strategies, organization and business processes revolve around this basic proposition. Each of these three former Universal units actually requires a somewhat different business model. Each was just a slice of the overall business. So they sometimes struggled to get the resources they needed to maximize their potential. It was always a balancing act.

By creating Unovis, we can optimize strategies, organizations and business processes around a common business model for their products and services. The business model is very different from that of a pure equipment manufacturer. The equipment manufacturer is almost always targeting the assembler of a product, trying to respond to either a specific assembly challenge or a capacity increase--in most cases in the short term. Although Unovis will be supplying equipment into this user environment as well, we have the capability of engaging our customers and adding value for them over the entire lifecycle of their product, from inception through volume production.

To fully address this opportunity, Unovis will engage customers earlier in their product lifecycle. We will continue to work with and support our current valued customer base, but we will also expand our reach, since many of our potential customers are not the assemblers of the product. To effectively reach these potential customers, we consider it imperative to have our own dedicated channels to the market.

By the way, all this is beneficial for Universal as well. As Unovis focuses on its own business, Universal can now direct its undivided attention to its core markets and customers--surface- and insertion-mount. In addition, Unovis and Universal will continue to cooperate closely to ensure that those customers requiring joint products and services get excellent, seamless support.

CA: You mention a dedicated channel to the market. How will that work?

RH: Our target is to establish an effective and efficient sales channel based on our own dedicated sales resources in combination with selected partners to ensure comprehensive worldwide coverage. This is one area where the inclusion of the Hover-Davis Direct Products division plays a key role, since we will leverage, wherever possible, its well-established sales channels for our much-broader range of product offerings.

We will organize our sales organization with a regional structure for the Americas, Europe and Asia, each having a regional sales director reporting directly to me. We will develop a solutions-oriented sales and marketing approach to support the regional teams, and target key customers in the component assembly, automotive, medical and telecom markets.

CA: Will the engineering and R & D groups be intermixed or are they dedicated to the four units?

RH: From the beginning, our focus will be to establish one consistent team to go after the business. From an engineering perspective, however, looking at the diversity of our products and services, we will end up with a hybrid structure. The biggest change is that a specific product was "owned" by one of the divisions. This will no longer be the case. Our products will now be used in a way to best meet the assembly challenges in all our target markets.

Unovis will also invest heavily in the development of materials and processes. Our customers' assembly challenges will be supported through our Advanced Process Laboratory, which has facilities both in the U.S. and China. With this lab, we have one of the most extensive repositories of process knowledge for component and board-level assembly in the world, and I feel it is one of our best-kept secrets. Going forward, we want to make this much more accessible to potential customers.

Last, we will continue advancing our roadmaps on multiple fronts, focusing on standard building blocks, applications and processes. We will ensure that our roadmaps continue to support the solutions required by our customers well into the future.

CA: What are your top priorities over the next six to 12 months?

RH: Our focus will be on putting a strong marketing and sales organization in place. I firmly believe that we have a significant opportunity to grow our business just by reaching more of the right customers at the right time in their entire product development lifecycle. In parallel, we will reinforce our support organizations to make sure that we can handle the potential increase in process and application development, while providing the highest level of field support.

Looking farther ahead, we will broaden our strategic partnerships so that we can offer our customers even more comprehensive solutions. In doing so, we will look to improve strong regional engineering and applications support.

CA: What message are you taking to customers?

RH: Unovis Solutions is about tailoring comprehensive process and assembly solutions to customers' specific assembly challenges. Be it component-level assembly, odd-form assembly or final assembly and test, we can tailor product solutions at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible yield and reliability.