THE CUSTOMER PARTNERING EXPERIENCE

Recently, we received a late day customer call requesting immediate assistance. At a meeting the very next morning, we were informed that our customer had committed to the delivery of 3 prototype units to their largest semiconductor customer within the next 7 weeks. The issue was that the development of a P&ID had not been started. For the next several hours, a rough draft of the P&ID took form on a series of white boards.

Within a day, Dakota's engineering team refined the P&ID draft and came up with 3 possible designs. During a follow-up the next day we received our customer's endorsement on one of the designs. In consideration of this projects schedule, several processes that typically take place in serial had to be done in parallel. That is, bill of material, schematics and assembly drawing refinements where taking form while a turn key cost estimate was being developed. This expedited process continued through the build cycle and Dakota delivered 3 prototype units to our customer in time for the evaluation testing that had to be completed prior to delivering the units to the end-user.

Following suit with a "Never Designed/Built" customer experience theme, several months ago we were presented with two new Biopharmaceutical opportunities. This customer came to Dakota with a concept for two totally different next generation Biopharmaceutical technologies. One was a tabletop chromatography system and the other was a Thin Film Evaporator.

For each concept we were presented with a P&ID file, an operational specification and an approximation for each of the tools footprint. After teaming with the customer's technical staff for about a month, two of our design/project engineers gained a comfortable working knowledge for these next generation technologies and had developed a set of 2-D drawings for each. Within one month of this milestone the 3-D drawings had been created and signed-off. With very few modifications the prototypes were built to print and shipped. From concept to prototype ship, the total cycle time for both of these new technologies was about 14 weeks.