Sitting down at FermionX with Managing Director Will Patrick, we explore how a third-generation MD took a family electronics manufacturer from tribal knowledge to a data-first operation that customers can see, trust, and scale with.
We start with the lineage—granddad’s silkscreen craft evolving to PCBs, then assembly—and why honoring that service and customer focussed ethic made the transformation stick. Then we lift the hood on the digital rebuild: a modern MES for full traceability, powerful dashboards for top-level clarity, and smarter quality tooling including Koh Young's KSMART and Luminovo. The goal wasn’t technology for its own sake; it was a single source of truth where every action leaves a data point and every decision gets faster, cleaner, and easier to audit.
From there, we talk growth. By redesigning processes and floor layout, Will has created headroom to push from around £10M to £25M without stacking overhead. We break down how visibility wins contracts in the EMS world, why customers value shared dashboards and live traceability, and how a long-term, 20–30 year plan changes which investments make sense today. We also get practical about AI: exception-driven MRP alerts, machine feedback loops, and agentic systems that surface the one issue that will derail tomorrow—after, and only after, the data foundation is solid.
If you care about scaling a contract manufacturer without losing your soul—or your margins—you’ll find concrete steps here: where to start with MES, how to drive cultural adoption, which metrics to watch, and how to stitch tools together so operators move faster, not slower. Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of manufacturing, data, and leadership, and tell us what you'd automate first.

EMS@C-Level is sponsored by global inspection leaders Koh Young (https://www.kohyoung.com) and Creative Electron (https://creativeelectron.com)

You can see video versions of all of the EMS@C-Level pods on our YouTube playlist.