(Editor’s note: This is the 29th installment in a monthly series highlighting some of the region’s unsung manufacturers that make products essential to the economy and, in many cases, our way of life. See previous installments here.)
Electronics have certainly evolved over the past 40 years, and so has VR Industries Inc.
When Brian Pestana first started working at the electronic contract manufacturer – a third-party company that designs, manufactures and tests electronic products for other businesses – in 1996, the company was still actively using
typewriters, and assembly instructions lacked photos or color ink, unless there was a drawing.
“I came out of WPI [Worcester Polytechnic Institute] working on the computers every day, then I came here, and they were using typewriters to create their quotes,” said Pestana, CEO and president of VR Industries. “I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’ ”
One of his first tasks for the company was working in engineering and using digital cameras to improve the quality of assembly instructions.
The company has continued to keep up with technological changes and now Pestana is beginning to use artificial intelligence for marketing and evaluating data.
These kinds of investments are what helped VR Industries stay in business for 40 years.
“I think in this business, it’s important to invest in the business, invest in people,” Pestana said. “To maintain competitiveness in the world that we live in, you have to continue to invest.”
VR Industries was founded in 1985 by Pestana’s father, Fred Pestana. He had originally bought a relay company known as Vanguard Relay in Long Island, N.Y., before moving to Rhode Island and transitioning the company to electronic contract manufacturing.
While growing up, Pestana had no plans of heading the Warwick-based company. But he joined after graduating from college to bring some youth to VR Industries’ workforce.
From there, he made his way through the ranks, beginning with engineering, then to information technology, operations, and business development before buying out the company and taking over as CEO in 2010.
Along with continuing to invest in people and new technologies, Pestana says VR Industries has succeeded by narrowing down who the company’s best customers are.
VR Industries mainly works with customers in the industrial, defense and medical industries, as well as those within the blue economy. But overall, the company is looking for customers it can grow with.
“As long as we stay in our niche, we do a good job,” Pestana said. “We like customers that we can really develop a close relationship with, where we can understand their business and understand how we can help them grow their business.”
At the core of VR Industries’ work is assembling printed circuit boards.
The process begins with a board – which can come in any color but is typically green – engrained with lines, which are the traces of circuitry that connect pads throughout the board. Bare circuit boards can come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s the traces of circuit that make it custom. Each customer needs different amounts of voltage flowing into and out of the board.
VR Industries creates circuit boards for all kinds of electronics, from night vision goggles for the defense industry, to a device that measures altitude in a plane, to a machine that monitors the temperature of a sprinkler system.
“Anything that has technology, we can help customers,” Pestana said.
The bare circuit board comes to VR Industries once the customer has designed what it needs, which the company can also help with. From there, the design is programmed into one of VR Industries’ four lines for surface assembly.
The first step is sliding the circuit board into a machine that coats it with a thin layer of solder paste. Then, the board goes into a pick-and-place machine that is programmed to know where each of the components is supposed to go on the board. The machines use nozzles to pick each of the components that are supplied on a line of tape and then place them in the proper location.
The process is quick, taking just minutes for almost 400 components to be placed on a board. Once the board comes out, it will go into a reflow oven. There, the board is heated up and then cooled down, which helps solidify the components to the board. Each board then goes into an automated optical inspection machine, which is connected to a computer that is programmed to know where each component should be and magnifies the board in 3D. An employee will look at the components on the computer to ensure they’re facing the right direction and have correct solder connections.
Components that have leads – or metal pieces that go through the board – go through the selective soldering process. There, they are placed in a machine, also programmed with the design, in which a nozzle will solder each of the leads from the bottom of the board.
Just steps away from where the boards are assembled is the company’s Customer Innovation Center. This is a space dedicated to helping customers determine a manufacturing plan for their product before it gets released onto the floor.
“Our job, as a company, is also to help younger companies scale their business,” Pestana said. “They partner with us because we have the manufacturing facility, operations and quality systems in place.”
Quality is important to VR Industries. It was the first electronic contract manufacturer in Rhode Island to earn the ISO 9001 certification – an internationally recognized quality management system – in 1996 and it has the ISO 13485, which is a medical-device quality management service standard.
This year, the company is working on getting a National Institute of Standards and Technology certification and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0.
Before they’re sent to the customer or placed into an electronic, each circuit board is tested to make sure all the electrical connections are working.
“In general, circuit board assembly is a complex, complicated business,” Pestana said, adding there are many opportunities for error, as each solder connection must be correct for the circuit board to work properly.
Now, as VR Industries is in its 40th year, Pestana has no plans of slowing down and hopes to grow the business within its current 35,000-square-foot space.
Specifically, Pestana hopes to run the equipment more often and possibly expand to have a second eight-hour shift in the coming years, which would require hiring more employees beyond the current 35-person staff.
VR Industries is also working with state partners to connect with potential customers and get additional certifications.
“You’ve got to be flexible and adapt and evolve to the work that’s available and what people need,” Pestana said. “It’s really what our customers need, and we’ve done a good job of keeping them happy and hope we can continue to do that.”
