How F&K Delvotec rose to the top spot for the first time in Focused Suppliers

August 23, 2012

2012 was the first time F&K Delvotec, a wire bonder supplier, captured a top spot in VLSIresearch’s 2012 Customer Satisfaction Survey. Competing against all focused semiconductor equipment manufacturers in the world, F&K Delvotec beat them in ten categories. This is an amazing accomplishment because F&K Delvotec is based in Germany, while most of its customers are in Asia. Moreover, they are relatively small on a global scale with just over 100 employees worldwide, proving that size and scale are no barriers to customer satisfaction.

F&K Delvotec has almost always placed in the top group of THE BEST Suppliers of Assembly Equipment for over 15 years, regularly inching higher and higher in the ratings each year. In the last four years they topped this off by consistently being the highest-ranked wire bonder manufacturer. F&K Delvotec increased its rating 7% this year to 8.51 against THE BEST Assembly Equipment Suppliers. So how do they do it?

Customer satisfaction is a ground game and F&K Delvotec addresses it with an engineering group in Singapore dedicated to customizing the automation systems on bonders to specific requirements.  They also recently expanded their support network with new offices in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. These teams are key reasons why customers rated F&K Delvotec best in field engineering support and support after sales, both at 9.0 on a scale of 1 to10. It’s also why customers wrote in such things as:  ‘Perfect service attitude and excellent technical skill.’ ‘Excellent product -- does as advertised. Very good product support and Applications Engineering support. Very responsive, with quick, good answers to questions/concerns.’

Small companies do this by staying extremely focused. That’s best done by executives who lead from the top. The president of F&K Delvotec, Dr.-Ing. Farhad Farassat, is a co-founder and more than that, he was behind a management buyout back in 1992.  So, F&K Delvotec is his legacy and he takes it personally. Who better to keep a company lean and mean? At the same time, he is very focused on his team’s performance and lets them know how proud he is of them when they succeed. As Dr. Farassat puts it, “We have set our sights on highest technology from the very beginning, and this has been the base of our success. In an expensive country such as Germany, there is really no alternative. But that alone is not sufficient: one needs to take care of the customer and provide the best possible service. We did not rest on our high-tech laurels but put enormous effort into a densely-woven service infrastructure, and this strategy is now bearing fruit.”

On the product side, the company had two new developments. One is their double-headed bonder G5-2 which is a very productive wire bonder, especially for power devices, and has been extremely popular.  Second is their brand-new G5-XL which hits the special requirements of solar cell and e-mobility manufacturers head-on with its huge working area.

Achieving high customer satisfaction often pays dividends in other areas of a company. For  F&K Delvotec  it came with their brand-new G5-XL which was developed in an astoundingly short time of just 5 months. Having a sharp customer focus keeps development teams focused on getting innovations out of the lab. They’ll do this with processes like modular design, which shortens time to market. There is a feedback effect on customer satisfaction because in the case of F&K Delvotec, many components are standard across the G5 bonder family, which have been proven in hundreds of bonders. Thus there is a cumulative reliability effect of such standardization.

As for how they think F&K Delvotec makes a difference in the field of customer satisfaction, they say, “We have a deceptively simple answer to this question: we listen to our customers, and especially to their process problems. One result of this was the G5-XL. A second result was that we installed the special engineering group in Singapore. Being that much closer to many of our core customers has meant shorter turn-around times while keeping the quality advantages of ‘Made in Germany.’ Thirdly, we have acquired a huge body of scientific know-how about bonding, much of it in close and long-standing collaboration with leading research and university institutes. This has been a major benefit for our customers in understanding and removing problems, stabilizing processes and improving yields. We have received considerable praise from many customers about our quick response and deep-reaching problem solving help."

This text is approved for public release by certified media and must maintain the statements clearly identifying the VLSIresearch 2012 Customer Satisfaction Survey as the source. No advertising or other promotional use can be made of the information in this release or VLSIresearch’s 2012 Customer Satisfaction Survey. Copyright © 2012 VLSI Research Inc. All rights reserved.

About the 2012 Customer Satisfaction Survey

VLSIresearch received feedback from more than 99% of the chip market for this year’s survey. The survey spans two and half months and covers five languages. Worldwide participants were asked to rate equipment suppliers among fifteen categories based on three key factors: supplier performance, customer service, and product performance. 2,102 surveys were returned, resulting in 49,480 total responses.

The VLSIresearch annual Customer Satisfaction Survey on Chip Making Equipment is the only publicly available opportunity for chip manufacturers to provide feedback on their suppliers since 1988. The 10 BEST, THE BEST, and RANKED 1^st awards provide special recognition to the suppliers that are rated highest by their customers. For more details on the survey, click here.

About VLSIresearch

VLSIresearch is an award-winning provider of market research and economic analysis on the technical, business, and economic aspects within semiconductor, nanotechnology, and related industries. VLSIresearch provides intelligence for faster and better decision making in the areas of semiconductors, photovoltaics, LEDs, display, manufacturing, materials, and critical subsystems.  VLSIresearch was founded in 1976. 

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