CURRENT ISSUE
| Cover Story |
| Columns |
| Sawyer Continues to Stay on Top With Innovation |
| Raw Materials/Parts | |
| By John Libby | |
| Thursday, 15 March 2007 | |
 Sawyer Technical Materials is at the forefront of providing hydrothermal-grown quartz crystals for all the latest electronic devices. No matter what the latest devices are, Sawyer is at the forefront of providing the electronics industry with hydrothermal-grown crystal quartz, a material used in most electronic applications, says company President Kelley E. Scott. “Innovation sets us apart,” he says. “We are frequently the first to set new standards for quartz crystal perfection. And we were the first – perhaps the only – company in the quartz business to adopt semiconductor manufacturing tools and methods. We are proud of having survived 50 years in the electronics industry where we have to lower prices and make better products every year.” The company currently has 140 employees, average revenues of $15 million a year and has manufacturing facilities in Conroe, Texas; Eastlake, Ohio; and Shanghai, China. Electronic Evolution The evolution of electronic products has kept the company busy, but whenever an application has gotten large, such as cell phones, Sawyer has faced fierce foreign competition. “It has happened over and over again,” Scott says. During the cell phone boom in the 1990s, Sawyer provided more than 60 percent of the quartz needed for the product worldwide. Scott says that the company was under pressure to keep up with customer demand. In 2001, cell phone manufacturing peaked, then collapsed, and Sawyer and other manufacturers of cell phone components were left holding large volumes of component inventory that took a year or so to work down. “The demand didn’t collapse, but the growth rate that cell phone manufacturers were anticipating didn’t happen,” Scott says. That situation proved that the customer is not always right, he says. That collapse led to some financial difficulty for the company, so Sawyer had to restructure and streamline operations in 2004. Also, as demand increased again, cell phone technology changed and eliminated the need for quartz in many designs. Now, only 10 percent of the firm’s quartz goes to the cell phone industry while the majority goes toward producing vehicle ESC systems. Because some quartz components are being replaced with silicon computer chips, the company is converting unused quartz growing capacity to the growth of other crystals. Interestingly, these new crystals are so small as individuals that they can not be seen with the unaided eye. In bulk they appear as a powder. Quartz crystals, however, can weigh several pounds each. Manufacturing Expertise Quartz is grown and processed differently for each application, Scott says. The differences are precision, shape, size and purity of the material. For example, for cell phones, it is important that the surface polish is free of defects to nearly an atomic scale, he says. For ECS, the bulk quartz material must meet a high level of perfection, Scott says. Each of the company’s facilities has a different job in the process. In Eastlake, the imperfect natural quartz is dissolved in a water-based solution at high temperature and pressure and grown again in a more pure form. The quartz is then taken to Conroe, where is it sliced into wafers as thin as five sheets of paper, then put into a machine to make it even thinner. The crystal lithium tantalate is also semi-processed there, Scott says. “We can’t do things the same year after year,” he says. For example, one innovation Sawyer took from the computer industry was using wire saws instead of a diamond blade saw to cut the material. With a wire saw, Scott says, more pieces can be sliced from each stone. Sawyer looks for employees who are quick learners because electronics manufacturing processes change so quickly, he says. Also, the company is always looking for ways to improve quality and productivity. In the past 10 years, units produced per labor-hour have increased 285 percent. Montgomery County Community College, near the company’s manufacturing plant in Conroe, developed courses to help Sawyer employees. The classes focus on supervision, leadership and quality improvement. |
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