The electronics manufacturing and repair industry, with its rapid development in Poland, is becoming increasingly competitive. Small profit margins have made the ability to minimize costs crucial to success. In this paper, we’ll take a look at workstations dedicated to the electronics industry, and in particular how choosing the right solutions in this sphere helps reduce business costs and increase market advantage.
Discussing this issue should start with a rather clear point – the electronics manufacturing and repair industry requires dedicated solutions. The very fact that much of the activity should take place in EPA zones means that the equipment selected must meet appropriate standards. At the same time, this is a specific field – rapidly growing and often requiring the reconciliation of a high degree of flexibility with the highest precision of implementation.
For this reason, in this study we will look at a line of furniture and workstations created just for this industry. REECO Antistatic Furniture is a Polish brand of equipment for the electronics industry. They have been gaining recognition for many years in other industries as well, nevertheless the manufacturer, RENEX Group, emphasizes that they have been created with the thought and standards of the electronics manufacturing and repair industry in mind.
Cost of real estate
Back in the not-so-distant past, the size of manufacturing spaces was a factor often downplayed. The term small footprint appearing in the specifications of production facilities as a huge advantage was often seen as something that may have a significant place in the limited and very expensive square meters of buildings , e.g., in Tokyo but not here. Today, in a highly competitive environment, with the ever-increasing cost of renting and maintaining real estate, the ability to select the minimum space needed for a given business can be overwhelmingly important for maintaining a market advantage. It’s not so hard to imagine how much savings can come from, e.g., reducing the square footage needed for manual workstations by half.
REECO furniture responds to this need. The components included in this product line, especially the anti-static table-based workstations, are built vertically. This means that their design, based on a support frame and placed above the tabletop and in front of the worker, allows all the equipment and tools that would normally take up space next to the worker to be placed within its scope.
This allows a significant reduction in the space required for a single workstation, and on an enterprise-wide basis often reduces the required size of production halls and associated costs by values in the range of 50-60%.
Employee costs
With Poland’s increasing integration with Western European markets, the costs of workers are rising broadly. This is a trend that can only be expected to intensify as the economy grows and society becomes richer. In this situation, the ability to minimize these expenses becomes particularly important. A large part of tasks are being automated and robotized.
However, the rest of the tasks, which must be performed manually, can also be streamlined. The key to reducing costs here is labor ergonomics viewed in two dimensions – increasing process efficiency and reducing the risk of employee illness.
The furniture in REECO’s portfolio meets these needs. The solutions are modular, which means that they can be freely configured and adapted to almost any industry and type of business. This allows work tools and components to be set up within easy reach of the employee so that he or she has easy access to them.
This is served by the wide range of available shelves, bins, panels and mounting brackets designed to allow their use in the widest possible range of situations. This allows the employee to perform his tasks faster, without wasting time looking for things and moving around. This increases the efficiency of his work and reduces the risk of accidents related, for example, to his sudden movements with a load.
The risk of occupational diseases related to spinal degeneration is also minimized thanks to tables with electrically adjustable table top heights. This allows frequent change of working position from sitting to standing, which is recommended and has long been a health and safety standard in highly developed countries.
Introducing the right ergonomic solutions therefore makes it possible both to reduce the number of necessary jobs by increasing work efficiency and to reduce direct and indirect costs resulting from occupational accidents.
Long-term costs
As we mentioned earlier, the electronics manufacturing and repair industry requires dedicated solutions. This does not mean, of course, that it is impossible to manufacture furniture in-house for your own needs. What equipment and furnishings a particular company invests in is strongly dependent on its policies and how broadly it looks at its current situation and the one it will face in the future. However, manufacturing workstations for one’s own needs independently or by outsourcing this to craftsmen/subcontractors involves many costs that may not seem obvious. Even at the outset, such an approach, due to its small scale, involves much higher prices for raw materials, the purchase of appropriate tools, and time spent developing the right know-how.
In practice, this often results in a situation where even if there are some initial savings, they become negligibly small when all costs are added up. Furniture produced in this way is also, by its very nature, fraught with problems that will become apparent after time. This is because any attempt to expand or reconfigure the organization of a workstation or workstations will involve going through the entire process of designing and manufacturing the workstation or its new elements from scratch. REECO’s industrial furniture is based on the manufacturer’s more than 25 years of experience in the industry, knowledge of what solutions work in the long run and which customers are satisfied with.
This allows our customers to invest only in the components they currently need, knowing that if there is a need to modify the line they can dismantle the structures they already have and add new ones at any time. Full product availability to the customer – on the order of 100% of standard items in stock – is a key element of the manufacturer’s policy. This allows great comfort for customers, who can respond to the needs of their production lines even overnight, and sets RENEX Group manufacturer apart from imported solutions. At the same time, thanks to the potential of a domestic manufacturer, with the appropriate technological background and experience, it is possible to manufacture customized components, yet compatible with standard REECO modules, within a short period of time on customer orders.
The quality of REECO system components is largely due to the raw materials used. The furniture is manufactured from steel. This by the very nature of the material makes them much more durable and less prone to deformation than aluminum alternatives. Also of great importance is the applied coating that protects and imparts antistatic properties or antimicrobial layers, which, in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, are of great interest to businesses looking for solutions to minimize epidemiological risks. This is especially true for plants that operate around the clock, where workers on successive shifts sit at the same workstations.
REECO’s furniture production is equipped with the same surface preparation and protection system that is used to manufacture components in the aerospace industry. This allows them to be used without additional painting for up to 30 years. At the same time, the furniture is a specialized product designed for use in EPA areas where electrostatic-sensitive electronics are produced. For this reason, they are all coated with world-class coatings with antistatic properties. The electronics manufacturing and repair industry is very aware of the importance of using high-end ESD protection.
What’s next?
The workstation, of course, does not end with the furnishings. The space must be properly equipped, depending on the task, with items such as hand tools, soldering stations, desoldering stations, fume extractors, microscopes and consumables – binders and fluxes. Besides, ESD protection such as table mats, floor mats and safety bands should also be included. The whole is completed by appropriate clothing of the user, which minimizes the risk of electrostatic discharges.
The manufacturer of the REECO brand – RENEX Group – offers a wide range of products in this sphere as well. This applies both to its own production – in terms of, e.g., the new REECO Vapor Absorbers, or anti-static protection and ESD clothing – and to supplied products from global brands. RENEX Group is a partner and distributor of such global brands as YAMAHA, JBC, TAGARNO, GERFLOR, HELLER, INDIUM, and PIERGIACOMI, thus providing a comprehensive range of tools, equipment and consumables.
The selection of the right solutions can be facilitated by consultation with Technical and Commercial Advisors of RENEX Group – the owner of the REECO brand, who prepare projects, help arrange the interiors, select the most optimal solutions and carry out non-standard, specialized orders dedicated to individual customer needs. If interested, we also invite you to the RENEX TECHNOLOGY AND TRAINING CENTER and DEMO ROOM, where you can see sample solutions for a cross-section of workstations.