- Customer Success with Koh Young
Mission-Driven Manufacturing
When visitors tour Microboard’s Connecticut facility, they immediately notice something different. “Right after COVID, we started inviting customers back in, and they were all saying to me, there’s something different. Your employees are happy, they’re engaged,” explains Nicole Russo, CEO and Owner. “And I say, Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?”
Founded 43 years ago by Craig Hokenga, the company operates on two premises: build the most leading-edge technology while helping those least fortunate. This dual mission, inspired by God, has enabled the company to install over 1,200 water wells, impacting over seven million livers in regions affected by conflict and poverty worldwide.
Microboard, a family-owned electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider based in Connecticut, has doubled in size over the past four years by focusing on high-complexity, low-volume production for a select group of customers. Central to their success has been a strategic approach to digital transformation, with strategic equipment partnerships, particularly the inspection partnership with Koh Young, playing a critical enabling role. The company maintains exceptional quality metrics (99% first pass yield, <0.1% RMA rate) while producing 40,000-50,000 printed circuits board assemblies each month.
Complexity as Competitive Advantage
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"At Microboard, our bread and butter is the more complex boards. We have a small customer base where we pride ourselves in really being strong partners. We're helping them with NPIs, which creates unique challenges because we're not seeing the same thing over and over again."
– Bryce Poland, Vice President of Quality and Continuous Improvement.
“A lot of the products we’re building were designed 20, 30 years ago. So, you’re dealing with obsolete components that are extremely hard to get.” This combination of legacy designs, cutting-edge technology, obsolescence management, and extreme miniaturization creates complexity that few manufacturers can navigate.
Wayne Ellis
Vice President of Supply Chain
Digital Transformation: Fingertip Data
Microboard’s approach to digital transformation is pragmatic and focused on operational value. Lee, who oversees manufacturing, engineering, facilities, and IT, emphasizes actionable intelligence: “When you look at our shop floor, everything has inputs and outputs. How do we best leverage those IOs to convert that to good data? I call that fingertip data—how do we give folks fingertip data to make the best decision at that moment? That’s the real key because data in itself, we generate a ton of it. It’s how you synthesize that down to what operators can make a decision on.”
“Where we take our first step is always with people. We’ve got to have the right talent. And then it drives down to process talking with the Koh Young team, making sure we have the right technical equipment available in the market to get us where we need to be. And then we drive that with systems. So, we take a very holistic approach.”
This approach requires frequent collaboration. “Koh Young is here quite often,” Lee explains. “With a lot of our growth focused on very complex products, we really want to make sure that our partners are in quite often, identifying the new technology, the latest and greatest things.”
Lee Kemper
Executive Vice President of Operation
digital transformation
Empowering Innovation, Perfecting Production
