To succeed in today's rapidly evolving EMS market you have to concentrate on what you are good at and keep doing it better. This is exactly why Axis Electronics built on it's military and aerospace heritage and specialised in the manufacturing the highest reliability products in low to medium volumes across all industry sectors. "It seemed a natural progression when we introduced three autonomous manufacturing lines, each with a fully dedicated support team, to focus on their selected customers." comments Phil Inness, Managing Director of Axis. With improved communications and direct contact, sorting daily issues became routine and improved customer satisfaction performance came quickly. The complexity of the designs, wide range of products and need for rapid change over means life is far from easy but the structure of direct communication between manufacturing line and customer, combined with web based order tracking, helps make for the quick fixes to any problem that arise.
There are two reasons we started looking for a new machine. Each line currently has a top end, dedicated selective solder machine and time on a shared resource on a nitrogen fed leaded flow solder machine. At certain times the selective machines can be a bottleneck and the new Sun East machine will remove the bottleneck. The second reason is related to risk management and we were keen to have a fallback should our existing leaded flow solder machine develop a problem which could not be supported. By having a new machine, with as spare solder pot, we can offer a reduced risk solution to our customers.
When it came to the actual choice we went through a demanding selection process. We solder a wide range of PCB's and some of our customer's products are very complex and thermally challenging, so when we looked to specify a new wave soldering machine we considered the need for a high preheat capacity and the option for a nitrogen inerted solder pot with sufficient solder capacity to ensure a stable wave height. After researching the market we short listed three machines that would meet our requirements. We selected the Sun East machine because it not only met all of our requirements but in addition offered 3 zones of top side convection preheat over 1.8 metres. After sales support was also important and we were pleased with the commitment that Zen Production Equipment have made to support Sun East in the UK with demonstration facilities and spare parts stocking. The personnel have years of experience in soldering so we feel
