ACW Technology is something of a phenomenon in the UK sub contract industry.

A privately owned company, it was formed in 1989 and has adapted to serve an ever changing industry and list of clientele.

While many UK manufacturers in the CEM segment lost business to low cost economies, ACW Technology has managed to grow to in excess of £45m turnover, with over 400 employees, based in England (Hedge End), Wales (Tonypandy) and China (Zhuhai).

This exceptional growth has been achieved in a number of ways. Managing Director Owen Reeves attributes ACW Technology's success to a number of factors:

• the ability to truly offer total assembly of its client's products from the design stage through to new product introduction and to final assembly
• targeting of high technology markets requiring top quality manufacturing standards
• close customer liaison
• flexibility and reliability
• global purchasing leverage

Reeves comments on the adaptation that ACW has undergone during its 19 years; "During the early years of ACW, we had a number of high volume products, reflecting the UK electronics' industry at that time, These days however, it is well known that most high volume manufacturing has left these shores and has migrated to lower cost economies. This left us in the position where we needed to replace these diminishing volumes with a different kind of product mix".

By deliberately targeting some key high technology industries, ACW managed to replace the high volume products with products from industries such as Aerospace, Military, Security and Medical.

This required a much greater focus on technology and quality systems and a greater liaison with clients to develop their products ready for the market.

Owen reflects on ACW's surface mount capabilities and the change that they have had to implement to match these new demands; "We have been very prudent in purchasing SMT placement equipment over the years and had 11 high speed Panasonic lines installed in the UK. Though these were excellent machines that served us well, their lack of ability to be set up and changed over efficiently, sometimes taking two days to prepare for a job, meant that we needed to look at new production equipment".

ACW went to the market to look at available machines with the ability to handle the new technologies and able to be set up and changed over as quickly as possible.

After extensive evaluations of machines available Keith Stone (Quality and Production Engineering Manager) was charged with a decision on which equipment ACW should choose to equip their new facility in China:

"We looked at a number of machine vendors and it was quite clear to us that, although there are a lot of capable machines available, there aren't that many capable of the quick set ups and extreme flexibility that we required. Also of great importance to us was the quality of service support we could expect in China but also in the UK where it was our intention to ‘standardise' on an equipment set".

Since Europlacer have a service network in China as well as the UK and other areas around the globe and the equipment exhibited the technological requirements needed for ACW the choice to invest in Europlacer was made easier.

"Europlacer ticked all the boxes for us", Stone comments "and having now installed the machine in China, followed by 6 Vitesse machines between Tonypandy and Hedge End, we have found that our decision has been vindicated. Europlacer has supported us as we expected and has also managed to incorporate some software enhancements that we wanted to be included".

By investing in flexibility ACW has managed to increase its efficiency enormously while adding even greater flexibility to its facilities:

"By replacing many of our Panasonic lines with Europlacer machines we are now much more efficient than we were and, as a result, we have managed to free up an enormous amount of floor space and reduce the number of operators on the lines", remarks Stone.

Owen Reeves displays a great pride in the way in which ACW works very closely with its customers, "we have clients with household names such as BAE Systems, Thales and EADS where we have become their manufacturing arm and we see engineers from our clients on our shopfloor almost daily. So, as we expect to have a very close relationship with our customers, we expect the same level of commitment from our suppliers. We have found that Europlacer has a similar view as us and, as a result, I am delighted with the decision we took to expand our manufacturing capabilities with Europlacer and hope to replace the remainder of the Panasonic machines with more Europlacers!"

http://www.acw.co.uk/