Expert-EMS Increases Manufacturing Capacity in Southern California
According to the Orange County Register, Expert-EMS in Tustin, CA is expanding their electronics assembly capacity. Details are sparse describing what that increase in capacity is, mentioning only a move from a 9,000 sqft facility to a new 26,000 sqft location. The cost associated with expanding to a facility that large represents a huge investment, provided they are taking up all twenty six thousand square feet. According to officespace.com, industrial property in Tustin leases at prices in excess of $1/sqft, which is comparable to what I’ve seen this year looking for space north of Los Angeles.
Considering that a move to a less expensive location outside of Orange or Los Angeles counties would help to cut down on that location premium, I think it’s interesting to understand that the strategy of Expert-EMS is to stay as physically close to its customers as possible. The article says eighty percent of their business is from Orange County or San Diego county, and the rest from Los Angeles and Riverside, and primarily from OEMs. That is a lot of business from a small geographic area. Expert-EMS’ VP of Business Development, Darlene Quinn, mentioned a major success driver being R&D organizations wanting 24-hour turn on jobs to get proofs-of-concept in house as fast as possible. Tellingly, “Many of the engineers want us at arm’s distance. They want to be able to run down here if they have questions.” What that boils down to, is EEs driving to the factory to hash out whether their boards don’t work because of a problem with the design or a problem with the manufacturing: customer service, in some cases, just means being close so your customer can yell at you.
The list of companies in the article that have left SoCal reads like a Who’s Who of Industry: Mistubishi, Pfizer, Panasonic and Toyota Motor Sales, although it’s not clear to me how many manufacturing job losses those companies generated: Toyota moved it’s entire Toyota USA campus to Plano meaning more sales and finance staff relocated than wrenchers and welders. The closure of the NUMMI plant in Fremont was the true coffin nail for automotive manufacturing in California. I was speaking with the owner of a tool and die shop early in 2018, and she said that manufacturing in Los Angeles county still accounts for more jobs than the entertainment industry and those numbers are born out, at least as of 2015 when an LA County Economic Development Corp study said that 5% of the Los Angeles workforce was involved in durable goods manufacturing, and 2.9% was Motion Picture and Sound Recording. The increase in manufacturing capacity at Expert-EMS will hopefully translate to an increase in jobs for the area, and not gig-economy jobs either, but skilled manufacturing technicians able to load a pick-n-place or perform x-ray inspection on a BGA.
The equipment list published by Expert on their website does show quite a bit of capability already. Even if they only have one Samsung SM481 and one Samsung SM482, that represents (advertised, so take it with a grain of salt) 80,000 component placements per hour. If you’re conservative and run the equipment at 50% speed, you could still assemble more than 260 boards with 150 components on them, every hour. Those Samsung’s also have 120 feeders each, so less cassettes to constantly swap out, reducing the setup fees for their customers. They also have automated optical and x-ray inspection capability so dense board designs and QFN/BGA package assemblies can be validated on site. My bet is that the line workers down on the floor are probably looking forward to the increase in storage space as much as adding new equipment. You can just picture the overflowing parts cabinets full of partial reels, and not one extra inch of wall space to put in a new cabinet. As we used to say at my old lab, “I guess we’ve filled up X and Y, the only other axis we can store anything is in Z.”
Congratulations on your new 26,000 sqft facility, Expert-EMS!
