Kevin Dede: A bunch of questions, but I think probably the best one to ask is, maybe drilling in a little deeper on your view of the supply chain and the improvement you’re seeing and where you think it can go and in sort of what time frame?
Michael Murray: Yes, great questions. So we brought on some new talent in the procurement business side of the business, I should say. And also a new individual name of Ray, who joined us from Raytheon as our Quality Director, and they’re actively working with suppliers right now to make sure that we’re getting our material on time in full, and we’ve got a better incoming inspection, quality inspection levels. So we’ve already embarked upon this, and they’ve got a clear mandate to reduce costs into the building and work with a supply chain set that is more approved than, I’d say, sporadic. So that work is ongoing. We’ve had some successes already with that team. So we’re starting to track it now, but we don’t have any data to share just yet.
Kevin Dede: Okay. When you step back and you look at the industry overall, though Michael, what — I mean, given pandemic disruptions now still sort of rippling through things, how do you think the overall industry has changed?
Michael Murray: Well, I think I think folks have started to realize that you need to be more aligned with your vendor base and that’s on both sides. When working with our customer base, I’ve been very impressed and humbled quite frankly and how much our top customers want to work with Kopin and make sure that we’re healthy, happy and a great supplier for them. And when I say healthy, that means financially as well as making sure that we get what we need from them. These are excellent customers. I think they’re the best in the world. So they’ve learned, and just like we’re learning, that we need to keep our vendor base very close to us, treat them well. Make sure they understand what our desires are for the year in terms of research and development.
So bringing them closer to us is helpful, not kind of the old school way of keeping your vendors away from you and telling them what you need and not necessarily collaborating with them. So we’ve taken a different approach, and it seems to be, so far, working well for us, and it’s the same approach that we do and use with our customers, which is to work with them to make sure that we’re developing the right technologies for their road map and vice versa. We need to do the right — the same thing with our customer base. And I think that’s what’s changed for Kopin, through COVID and everything else. We’ve now realized how important our supply chain is and how important quality in the door is the quality out the door and I think that’s the biggest change that I’ve seen at least at Kopin.
From an industry perspective, I think firms are still finding a war on talent. And what I mean by that, Kevin is, it’s really hard to hire. Even though firms like ours are reducing for us and you see it every day, finding great talent is still really hard. So I think that’s what the biggest change in the industry that I’ve seen is folks just don’t want to go back to work. And if they do, they don’t want to come into an office. We’ve been very fortunate so far. I think we’re in a great place because of where we are and who we are, but I see other companies really struggling.
