Improved Process Control and Data Visibility by Moving from a Home Grown System to a Scalable MES

Norautron Suzhou, a subsidiary of Norautron Group, specializes in the manufacturing of high-mix, low-volume industrial electronics. In 2012, the company realized that their home-grown MES system could no longer support the growing demand from customers. The challenges they faced included increasing customer requirements and market regulations for mission-critical products. Products that need to work in tough environmental conditions or demand extremely high reliability like the ones Norautron makes for maritime, defense, and medical industries require traceability down to a single connection on a single electronic component. Also, process control and material management, including RMA is a must. However, the precise and high-level traceability and strict process control and management can only be achieved by a professional MES system, where Norautron’s home-grown system fell short. Ever-increasing time and labor cost while using and maintaining the home-grown system is another issue that troubled management. In the past, Norautron input tremendous labor-hours to create the trace record manually for each part and product to fulfill the traceability requirement and assure product quality. With increasing national wages, Norautron Suzhou found the labor cost, as a proportion of the whole operation cost rose so sharply year after year that company profitability was soon likely to be adversely affected.

Norautron Suzhou Co., Ltd. is a subsidiary of Norautron Group, which is headquartered in Horton, Norway. Norautron Group is a full-service electronics manufacturer that provides services ranging from design, test development, prototyping, PCBA, cable harnessing, electro mechanics, advanced box build, system integration, and industrialization to product lifecycle management and after-sales services. Norautron Suzhou focuses on the manufacturing of high-mix, low-volume industrial electronics, especially ruggedized-type products for maritime, defense, medical and other industrial equipment that require extremely high reliability in tough environments. In 2012, Norautron Suzhou realized that their home-grown MES system could no longer support the growing demand from customers.