We would like to thank our customers, suppliers and partners for a successful 2018; it's been a good year with loads of wins, challenges and new learnings.

The team at Precision wishes you a Merry Christmas and great success in 2019! We look forward to your continued support and partnership in the new year.

Please note that we will be closed from COB Thursday, 20 December 2018 and re-open on Monday, 2 January 2019.

Chinese New Year (CNY) falls on Tuesday, 5 February 2019, and almost all our suppliers in China will be closed from Friday, 1 February - Sunday, 10 February 2019. CNY doesn’t just affect electronic manufacturing that week or the week after - in fact, there can sometimes be a 4-6 week delay due to staff shortages, material shortages and factories fulfilling backlog of orders.

As our main suppliers of bare PCBs and some components are based in China, we have developed a time line to help you understand and manage any disruptions over the CNY holiday season.

2018

Monday, 10 December - Thursday, 20 December

Recommended time to place an order with Precision to guarantee delivery before CNY

2019

Monday, 21 January - Friday, 25 January

Most staff and employees in factories around China will be taking annual leave for CNY. Suppliers and subcontractors will slow down/cease production causing disruption in the supply chain

Friday, 1 February

All suppliers based in China will be shut down for the CNY holiday period

Tuesday, 5 February

Chinese New Year

Monday, 11 February

A few production staff and sales reps resume work. Manufacturing factories will run on minimal staff

Monday, 25 February

Most employees (including assembly line workers) will be back to work at factories

Monday, 4 March

Operations in manufacturing factories around China will resume back to normal

The key to overcoming the shutdown over CNY is good planning. So, if you require any PCBs and PCBAs by early next year (Jan/Feb 2019), we recommend that you place your order by Thursday, 20 December 2018.

Talk to us about your deadlines for early next year so we can help you avoid any delays.

Get FREE PCB Tooling, SMT Program and Paste Stencil when you place an order over $10K AUD (excluding GST) and Maximum 4 layer rigid PCB Standard

Offer valued between $750-$1,500 AUD

How to enter:

Terms & Conditions (of offer):

Promotional Offer Dates:

Offer only valid for quotes dated from 4 October 2018 to 31 December 2018Eligible orders must be placed within the offer period: 4 October 2018 to 31 December 2018

Eligibility:

Orders must be over $10K AUD (excluding GST) to be eligible for the offerOffer only eligible on local assemblyOffer is only valid for orders that contain one product/projectOffer does not apply on POs that contain multiple products/projectsPrecision Electronic Technologies reserves the right to change these terms and conditions at any time without prior notice and cancel the offer when deemed necessary

Earlier this month, our sales and marketing team travelled to Sydney to take part in this year’s Electronex, where we got a chance to meet existing and potential new customers. The event, which has been running for 9 years, was held at Rosehill Gardens in the city’s west end.

The expo showcased various PCB suppliers, contract manufacturers and engineering companies that specialise in design and innovative products. It was a fun two-day event reconnecting with friends and peers in the industry, discussing challenges, new ideas, and meeting new visitors.

Every year, Electronex hosts seminars given by leaders from different organisations present at the event. This year’s focus was on IoT, 3D printed electronics and Industry 4.0, which highlighted the growing trend of after sales remote monitoring of products, with the intention to provide a better customer experience.

We also got a chance to meet new customers, introduce them to Precision and present how we can meet their PCBA and cable assembly requirements. If you didn’t get a chance to meet us at Electronex, feel free to drop us a line at contact@precision.com.au or complete our Request for Quote form if you’d like us to provide you with a quick quote for your PCB/PCBA requirements.

Having set a strategic direction for the organisation with four objectives for the next 3 years, the next step was to determine how far we should advance during 2018. The questions we asked ourselves as a leadership group were:

What are some of the must-wins?

Answering the above two questions isn’t as straight forward as you’d think. How does one know and measure if we have a culture of innovation?

So here are our goals for 2018 against the four strategic objectives:

Once we set goals towards each strategic objective, the next step was to define the same by department.

What does each department need to do and achieve for the 2018 goals to be realised?

Each department manager worked with their teams to come up with their (department) objectives and plan. We ended up with a Sales plan, an Operations plan, a Quality plan, an Innovations plan, an HR plan, Finance plan and OH&S plan, each with individual goals that had to tick off at least one of the four strategic objectives and provide at least a financial, social or environmental benefit. Each goal had to have a set of action(s) with a KPI and timelines.

After the departmental plans were finalised, the next step was to determine each individual employee’s role in making the year a success. This was done at the first performance management review (PMR) for the year, which included setting individual goals and tasks (contributing to the department objectives).

Ultimately the sum of the employees’ actions should result in the achievement of the organisation’s goals, which in the end ensures progress is made against the four strategic objectives for 2020.

We are very excited to announce that Precision will be taking part in this year's annual Electronex.

Electronex is Australia's leading electronics event where manufacturing companies from all around Australia showcase their products, services and capabilities. This year the event will be held in Rosehill Gardens in Sydney from Wednesday 5 September to Thursday 6 September 2018.

The Precision team will be there on both days at booth D14.

So, if you're in Sydney come by to Electronex, visit us at our booth and check out the latest and greatest in electronic manufacturing.

One of Precision’s core goals is to build a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, which will have a direct influence on all parts of the company. We want to build a culture where any employee can freely put their hand up and suggest a process improvement or submit a new idea or product concept. We want our staff to know that they have a voice.

As part of our commitment to building a culture of innovation, we held company wide innovation workshops last month. To assist us with this, we brought in Catherine Jacobs from Footprint Consulting who has worked with us before on other projects around innovation. Using her own personal experiences as an example, she explained the basic concepts of innovation and shared the importance of working together as ONE team. We also discussed Precision’s current direction in product development.

The purpose of running these workshops is to build a robust, transparent and efficient process that will enable us to develop new products. Our future goal is to create a highly motivated core team that will identify and create product ideas with the focus on efficient manufacturing (one of our other core goals).

As the Quality & Innovations Manager, I deeply understand how and why Innovation is vital for the sustainability of the company. So, our first step will be to create a core team and a steering committee that will meet regularly to share, discuss and evaluate ideas. We will also put a framework in place so we can track and measure our progress and extract lessons learnt from each outcome.

Having understood our individual and organisation WHY, our next step in the Annual Planning Process was to review our strategic plan.

While there is no rule for the length of time a strategic plan spans over, it needs to reflect the speed and predictability of the market one operates in. In the early 2000 when we were primarily a PCB manufacturer, our strategic plan spanned over a five-year period. This soon became a 1-year plan and then a 3-month plan and eventually became a ‘Let’s-make-it-through-the-next-month’ strategic plan. This was mainly because PCB manufacturing shifted rapidly to China from around 2005 onwards.

The 2020 Strategic Plan

Earlier this year, the Board of Directors and the Leadership Group locked ourselves away for two days to go through all aspects of the planning process; we jointly decided that looking 3 years ahead was sufficient at this stage.

Our 2020 Strategic Plan contains of four primary objectives:

Innovation,Product(s),Sales Growth, andEfficient Manufacturing

Our plan can be best described as a medium-term plan with high-level big picture objectives. We also decided to create targets for each of the objectives as this helps to provide distant milestones that help set direction for everyone in the company.

As the annual planning process (for the new year) always starts in Q4 of the previous year, the leadership team at Precision has been getting together since November 2017 to fine tune and improve our annual plans for 2018.

Over the next few months, I will share with you the six steps that we undertook to help us define our 2018 plans. These steps should prove useful to you when making your own personal and/or professional plans.

Understand your WHY

The first step we took was ‘Understanding our WHY’. Have a look at this video of Simon Sinek: