VEXOS: Global Leader in Electronic Manufacturing Services

Local service, global capabilities

State-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and innovative business practices continue to secure VEXOS’s position as a leader in the Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) sector

With a strong commitment to quality, VEXOS provides a wide range of advanced, innovative and on-time services to customers across the manufacturing industry. The company uses its years of experience in high-mix, high-complexity electronics manufacturing, and its state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities located globally, in order to offer full-service solutions for a variety of applications. As it continues to grow, VEXOS remains dedicated to the most cutting-edge ideas and technology in the manufacturing field.

Today, VEXOS has an established global presence, primarily serving mid to large OEMs across a diverse range of sectors. The company has worked hard to achieve its current success, as Cyril Fernandes, the company’s Senior Vice President of Global Business Development, discusses: “VEXOS was formed in January 2015, with the merger of two EMS industry leaders: EPM Global Services (Markham, Ontario, Canada) and STACI Corporation (LaGrange, Ohio, USA). With over 40 years of combined manufacturing experience, VEXOS has been servicing the North American and European industrial electronics market, with a growing and diverse customer base encompassing EMS Services, including NPI, PCBA, System, box level build, test development, complete aftermarket logistics and repair solutions as well as providing commodity solutions such as PCBs, metals and plastics.

“We are a global organization with over 300,000-square-feet of manufacturing space across facilities in the USA (LaGrange, Ohio), Canada (Markham, Ontario), China (Dongguan) and Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City), along with sales and suppor t offices in Hong Kong. VEXOS has approximately 1100 employees worldwide,” says Cyril.

VEXOS also offers a high level of customer support, as Cyril details: “We at VEXOS, pride ourselves in providing EMS services with a personal touch. We have a culture that emphasizes customer centricity, responsiveness, flexibility and effective communications across all levels of the organization.

“It is this level of customer focus, combined with unique offerings in custom commodity support, our global footprint, leading edge value engineering services, global supply chain management and support, that forms a cohesive offering, and sets VEXOS apart from others.”

All-around support

The company offers a diverse range of services, including Value Engineering, and DFX capabilities. This is all part of ensuring the customer has a comprehensive and seamless experience with VEXOS, as Brian Morrison, Vice President of Engineering, reveals: “One of our core values stems from our drive to be a part of the manufacturing arm of our customers’ operation, which includes working closely with their design, procurement and test teams to ensure the product is manufacturable, testable, and available to meet their time-to-market and cost targets.

“To assess these risks and provide comprehensive recommendations and actions for our customers, VEXOS provides Value Engineering Services, including DFX services, early in the design process and iterative review cycles with key milestones in the development process of our customers.

“During the development process, 80 percent of the product’s cost is established in the first 20 percent of the development cycle to ensure we have the highest possible chance of success. We engage in an early architecture phase to review preliminary BOMs and identify high risk parts including pending obsolescence, lead time concerns, supply availability for the lifetime of the product and budgetary costs to help designers avoid costly mistakes prior to moving to schematics and layouts.

“Our design for supply chain services cover this aspect of our DFX Services and includes component engineering capabilities to address cost, lead time, regulatory, compliance or availability concerns. During the layout, preliminary placement files are reviewed in line with our assembly rules and requirements to identify land pattern issues, design recommendations, and assembly risks to meet quality requirements.”

The entire process is completely comprehensive, providing customers with all-around support from beginning to end. “Our design for assembly services provide our customers with a manufacturing risk report including criticality, design rule violations with measurements and recommended corrections. Alternatively, design for fabrication focuses on the later phases after initial routing including stack-up, panel design, design rules and impedance checks. We typically work to provide expert guidance on laminate, supplier, sourcing and related direction as PCB is typically about 20 percent of a product cost.

“For larger systems including box build, VEXOS offers design for mechanical assembly reviews from our experienced mechanical team to identify areas of concern. We also use this capability to leverage our North America and Asia based custom material devices teams to provide early supplier engagement, including DFM, budgetary pricing, lead time and NRE estimates.

“Lastly and typically, an overlooked aspect of a product cost is testing. Our design for testability services enables designers understand their test access, and estimated coverage that helps to provide a test strategy recommendation for initial prototypes and volume productions.

“The result is a complete product roadmap, risk assessment and action plan for our customers to address both immediate and future needs. For customers looking for further value, our design and development teams can provide electrical and mechanical design services to support PCB layout, mechanical design, test development including in circuit test, boundary scan, programming and full turnkey functional evaluation.

“VEXOS’s Value Engineering and DFX Services are designed to help our customers during the productization phase of the product lifecycle to ensure that performance, manufacturability, quality and cost targets are met while ensuring time-to-market targets are exceeded,” states Brian.

Embracing automation

This impressive range of advanced capabilities is supported by VEXOS’s cutting-edge manufacturing facilities network. These facilities are carefully maintained, as Brian, and Wayne Hawkins, Senior Vice President and General Manager at VEXOS, confirm: “Our vision and direction for innovation, services and development comes from the needs of our customers and our internal stakeholders. Our technology roadmap is designed in strategic alignment with our customers’ and internal requirements with focus on components, materials, capabilities, enhancements and improvements.

“Our customers are leaders in their respective industries and having equipment that is reliable, capable and repeatable is critical to our business. An example of the close interaction between customer requirements and technology capability are the SMT vision systems we have in place. These are capable of accurately placing semiconductor devices with very large ball grid array configurations in area and extremely fine pitch. This requirement encourages close partnership with our equipment suppliers to provide custom algorithms, software and solutions to meet the challenge of size and accuracy.

“Automation of traditionally manual activities, including mechanical assembly, soldering and even warehouse automation with companies like Juki, has provided game changing efficiencies, traceability and throughput. It provides the infrastructure for further automation extending into manufacturing execution, job management and reporting at a level that could not be realized without these types of systems.

“Integration of systems and equipment to automate transactions, verifications and quality data into our core systems allows operations to have real-time feedback, accurate information and focusses operations on the key metrics of the business. Our partnership with their systems and equipment suppliers is the key to our success and embracing innovative technologies is a key element of our continuous improvement promise to our customers.”

Looking into the future is one of the ways VEXOS remains nimble and successful. The company anticipates considerable growth going forward, as Cyril concludes: “VEXOS has grown tremendously over the last few years through focused application on its core strengths of customer focus, flexibility and responsiveness. We apply these values to achieve key market penetration in the security, grid infrastructure, electric vehicle and medical markets, to name a few.

“With a number of select customer wins in the aforementioned markets, as well as growing our base core business through expansion of market share, the growth that we have seen will no doubt continue at a higher rate than we have seen in the past.”

VEXOS
www.VEXOS.com
Services: Electronics and manufacturing services