ESCATEC Switzerland (ECH) plays multiple important roles within ESCATEC. Besides having advanced electronics manufacturing capabilities, it also functions as a Design & Development (D&D) Centre and technology testbed for the Group, with a reputation for creating innovative products on time and within budget. A significant amount of what is designed, tested, and developed in ECH, eventually is rolled out to the other Group subsdiaries for mass production.
The scope of engineering offered by ECH relates mainly to D&D services, NPI and product lifecycle management services. The D&D services involves HW/SW/Mechanical/PCB Layout and specialisation in microsystems and packaging also known as MOEMS. What sets ECH’s D&D apart from a classical design house is the strong focus set on design for manufacturability during the product development phase.
The NPI and product lifecycle management services, meanwhile, primarily focus on industrialisation activities which is about using available resources in the leanest and most cost-efficient manner to set up an end-to-end process for the manufacturing and delivery of products.
Powering these capabilities in ECH is a team of about 40 qualified engineers and many other highly skilled employees with decades of experience. ECH’s engineers come from several countries in Europe and from a variety of disciplines. All are experts in their respective fields with a minimum of five years’ experience on average, and they serve as the backbone for all the innovative D&D and engineering feats accomplished at ECH.
The engineers are grouped into two highly competent teams, the first focuses on D&D while the second team focuses on NPI and product lifecycle management. The engagement and mix of engineers in any given programme are determined by the functional needs of the customer.
Effective project management is extremely important to ECH in view of the technical nature of offered services. ECH allocates project managers based on their specific talents and experience – which range from the development of complex medical devices according to ISO 13485 standards to the industrialisation of new products from multiple market segments - that will best fit the requirements of that project.
The project managers in general concentrate on one project at a time, which can range from several weeks to a year. This sole focus enables them to fully immerse themself in each assignment and thereby build trust and a strong relationship with the customer. To be successful, project managers must possess critical leadership, planning, and communication skills, they also need to be able to inspire teamwork and commitment in multi-disciplinary team members, and be knowledgeable about risk minimisation strategies in order to strike an effective balance between all stakeholders i.e. the customer, suppliers, employees and management.
Year in and year out, the project managers in ECH keep delivering multiple world-class D&D and engineering projects on time and within cost, and this talent and skill set has proved invaluable to the growth and solid reputation of ESCATEC as an electronics manufacturing services provider trusted by numerous major OEMs.
