Xretha Hall is a project manager at ACDi that manages 15 customers including 6 major accounts with significant ongoing weekly activity. She is an exemplary project manager because she has had hands-on experience in virtually all aspects of the electronics production process including being team leader for groups responsible for printed wiring board (PWB), harness, and final assembly and testing.
The beginning of her career involved working for GTE Sylvania in a high-volume electronics manufacturing environment, primarily serving as a Team Leader in printed wiring board assembly (PWBA) and final chassis assembly and test. Afterward, she transitioned into electronics contract manufacturing gaining experience in production team leadership, master production scheduling—working the last 15+ directly in a program/project management role.
Xretha works hard as a project manager to monitor and communicate program status both internally and externally to clients. She has mastered this through being directly involved with projects and programs from start-up and new product introduction (NPI) through pre-production and volume production. This has allowed her to work closely with both internal and external engineering, senior management, quality, purchasing/sourcing, and production teams learning the nuances, challenges, and unique interests of each party in a product’s complete life cycle and its associated costs.
Xretha is always up for a challenge and embraces complex projects. She recently had a Fortune 100 client that required program management for over 50 top-level assemblies and associated sub-level assemblies including PWBAs, chassis, mechanical and electromechanical assemblies, and final assembly integration and testing. The wide scope of customer contacts and interfaces required the coordination from the product development stage, prototype, and preproduction through build authorization, and even end-of-life refurb and remanufacturing. Subsequent product shipments involved several domestic locations in addition to multiple international sites including Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Europe and Asia.
ACDi’s project managers are also great problem solvers. Xretha got a call when her client supply chain coordinator was facing with significant cost reduction pressures on a specific assembly for an existing customer. ACDi was challenged to reduce the existing final unit sell price by 17%. This was during a time when internally ACDi was seeing price increases that were driving unit costs upward. Xretha, along with her ACDi team, immediately began holding meetings internally and with the end customer to work together to come up with potential cost-reduction solutions that would mutually benefit both companies. After two months of coordinated team effort involving both the client and ACDi engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, quality, and senior management they were able to collaboratively achieve a final assembly unit price reduction of 15%. Additionally, production lead-time for the assembly was cut in half, reduced from 20 weeks to an overall material and manufacturing lead-time of 10-12 weeks.
When she’s not being an ACDi project manager, Xretha enjoys shopping, reading, pampering her pet, and spending as much time as possible with her grandchildren.