The Benchmark Site Profile is an ongoing blog feature highlighting the manufacturing and engineering teams located around the world. This blog features the precision machining team from Concord, CA.
Site Profile – Benchmark Concord - Precision Technologies Team
As with almost all of Benchmark locations, the team based in Concord, CA has a long history of manufacturing excellence dating back over 30 years. Concord, CA is located about 45 minutes northeast of San Francisco. Our team is deeply rooted in the very dynamic semiconductor space, providing assemblies and components for capital equipment and supporting other demanding and challenging customers. The Benchmark Precision Technologies team in Concord has also worked closely with medical and aerospace customers over our long history.
Exceptional Leadership
The Concord, CA site officially became a part of the Benchmark family in 2009, but the leadership that helped shape the culture has been in place for much longer. What really sets the Concord team apart is our senior leadership that has worked hard to build a culture around transparency, trust, and respect amongst everyone on the team. As a team, we’re constantly asking one another, how can I help? It has enabled true friendships amongst all our team members and has strengthened our ability to have difficult conversations that many might shy away from.
Technical Expertise
Benchmark’s Concord site offers design for manufacturing, new product introduction and full production services that includes precision machining, advanced metal joining, and complex electro-mechanical assemblies. We also offer a wide array of technical expertise and advanced equipment to serve our semiconductor customers including electron beam welding, complex machining and mechatronic design capabilities, complex electro-mechanical assembly and test, precision CNC 5-axis milling and turning, high purity ceramic grinding, and an automated chemical clean line.
Additional capabilities at Concord include:
- Piece part and complex assembly with deep vertical integration
- Quality management systems with real-time shop floor process control that ensures quality compliance
- Localized supply chain teams that help drive cost optimization and achieve high on-time delivery.
We work closely with our customers on the initial design and work collaboratively through the process to develop a robust solution allowing us to move quickly through the NPI process and then in to full production.
Conquering Pandemic Related Issues
The past two years have been some of the most challenging for the Concord team because of the global pandemic. However, through all these challenges we managed to grow by 30% year over year. Our team has dealt with social distancing guidelines, supply chain issues, the increasing (and often inconsistent) demand for semiconductor equipment and overall extreme delivery pressures.
Throughout all of these challenges, our people have continued to succeed and grow. The staff is continually working weekends and extended shifts to meet Customer needs. And this attitude of coming together to finish a task has always existed among the team.
Not afraid to fail
Our culture and leadership are a huge part of what makes Concord a world class design engineering team, but also a great place to work. Our talented team of engineers loves a new challenge – they love taking on a project that others would struggle to be successful at. . We truly are not afraid to fail or get out of our comfort zone because we understand that is where there is true growth, and that spawns fresh ideas and innovation.
In 2018 we worked with a medical customer who had met with several other companies, and no one was willing to work with their aggressive timeline. We were one of four potential suppliers and our team was confident we would succeed, and we did.
The team also worked incredibility hard with another potential customer and after 18 months that company has now become one of our largest customers. Concord had partnered with a sister site, Almelo, that assisted us in acquiring this customer (One Benchmark). This example of cross-site teaming has paid huge dividends for our customer and our company.
We are also very collaborative across our internal team and with our customers. Every person’s input and perspective matters and makes a difference. We celebrate our wins as a team, and we also analyze and move forward from our setbacks as a team. We are a “no blame” culture.
We also take education and training very seriously. We encourage on-site training, offer tuition reimbursements, and encourage peer-to-peer training and internal promotion.
The next generation
The Concord team is passionate about mentoring the next generation of engineers. We have several team members who mentor local robotics high school teams and every year we sponsor capstone projects at Chico State University.
We aim to hire at least 5-10 students from the local university programs each year and look for interns from our local community college programs. We love giving back to the local engineering community and regularly look for opportunities to inspire and mentor students who are hoping to join our field.
To learn more about the Concord engineering team and how they can make your innovative ideas a reality, visit https://www.bench.com/concord-california
