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In 1977 businessman Roy Kusumoto established a solar panel manufacturing company called Solectron. To help raise the funds required to set up production he began offering electronic manufacturing services to the major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) around Silicon Valley. Up until that time most of these companies did their own assembly work in-house but Roy Kusumoto reasoned that during peak periods he could offer them a viable alternative to having to put on extra staff to cope with the extra work load. Staff that would become again redundant once the peak passed. A year later he sold Solectron to Winston H. Chen, the EMS business model took off and all plans to produce solar panels went by the wayside. Solectron was sold again in 2007 to Flexitron but not before it had spent many years as one of the largest international electronics manufacturing companies in the world and established a trend of outsourcing in the electronics industry that changed forever the way most OEMs operate. Solectron and most of the electronic manufacturing services that followed in its wake primarily started out producing the PCBs (printed circuit boards) for communication and computer systems but the OEMs did the system assembly work themselves. Today though most if not all contract manufacturing companies have broadened their range of services considerably, branching out into services design work, system assembly, testing, warranty and repair work, delivery and logistics, software design and customer service. They’ve also moved into other industries where electronic equipment has become a standard and important part of the production process. Industries such as medical, industrial and instrumentation. These days you’ll find very few OEMs actually do their own in-house assembly work. EMS companies, with their teams of trained and certified technicians, can produce and deliver better quality electronics products faster, and far more efficiently. Not only does this mean cost savings for the OEMs in terms of labour, specialize training and management, it also has human resource implications in that it frees them from having to manage these responsibilities. It also puts OEMs in a better position to meet market demands and keep abreast of competitors by being able to produce and deliver end products faster. But it isn’t just OEMs that have benefited from the rise of the EMS industry. NASA has for many years been instrumental in setting standards for electronic component manufacturing and assembling for the sections of the aerospace industry over which they hold sway and the rest of the industry has perforce adopted those or similar standards. Until recently the standard for soldering electronic components was NASA 8739 and in order to gain NASA and other high performance and mission critical contracts, contract manufacturing companies were obliged to ensure that their soldering technicians held this qualification. NASA has now adopted the J-STD-001 standard with some additional standards for their requirements. FastSMT is a Nadcap accredited EMS company and holds ISO-9000, ISO 13485, IPC 610 Class 3, J-STD-001E and J-STD-001ES certification as well as being ITAR registered. All solderers and technicians on their team also carry all the required industry qualifications for the industry including J-STD-001 Class 3 certification and the NASA 8739 certifications. They specialize in the design and manufacture of assemblies for mission critical applications such as life-support systems, aerospace, aviation, defense, telecommunications and medical.
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