Epec Engineered Technologies | Overall Excellence | 50-150 Employees
Epec Engineered Technologies may be the oldest circuit board company in North America, but its openness to change has helped it thrive in the modern day.
The 65-year-old, custom build-to-print electronics company shows its staying power not only with diversification, global engagement and an innovative culture, but speed to market as well. Its emphasis on aggressive growth over the past 15 years has been led by CEO Edward McMahon, with a revenue increase of more than $2 million from 2016 to 2017.
Based in New Bedford, Epec has certainly made its mark on history, with sky-high innovation. It was an Epec circuit board that went up on the Apollo flights in the 1960s-1970s, “pretty cutting edge at the time,” said Epec President Kendall Paradise.
But as circuit boards got lighter and smaller over the years, company leadership knew Epec had to grow in different directions. Now, everything Epec manufactures relates to circuit boards somehow, said Paradise. Company leaders continue to look for products fitting that business model while meeting current demand, and they continue to find ways to improve.
While Epec’s core business is circuit boards, they are now a component in projects rather than one separate circuit board product sold to customers, Paradise said, in industries such as aerospace, military and medical.
Heavy copper circuit boards that draw more power without overheating, for example, were added, along with battery packs, and flexible and rigid circuit boards, cable assemblies, user interface and HMI, or human machine interface. “When you pump gas, it’s the buttons you push, the front panel and all the stuff behind it,” Paradise said.
But while diversifying product offerings, Epec and its 116 employees had to do it over multiple locations in Florida, Colorado, China and Wales in a way that would ensure the same levels of quality and consistency cross-company.
Paradise, no stranger to the world of printed circuit boards, took up the charge.
Her family owned Beaver Brook Circuits before Epec acquired it in 2002. She’s credited with heading up Epec’s global logistics and supply-chain management model, even living in China for six months.
“We aren’t all in the same building, so it forces you to think about how you communicate as a company. It promotes a lot of brainstorming. It forces us to be active with things [such as] weekly check-ins,” said Paradise.
For the most part – despite the distance – all employees have met one another, she said. Engineers are brought in to work together from time to time, in person. Annual meetings have all leadership team members in attendance from across locations, with face-to-face interactions helpful in building a team dynamic.
But a modern, unified information technology network was also needed.
Epec won a 2015 Manufacturing Leadership Award in Innovation Process Leadership from the Manufacturing Leadership Council after replacing an inflexible ERP application system with the cloud-based NetSuite system across locations in 2007.
“In another innovation, Epec uses an online configure-price-quote engine … to enable customers to configure build-to-print circuit boards over Epec’s e-commerce website … reducing lag time and manual steps for both Epec and its customers while providing a complete record of specifications and transactions,” the council said in a press release.
This reducing of lag time is a priority for Epec. Paradise calls it a company differentiator.
“We like to get in on the design process as early as possible,” she said, creating a quality prototype that allows Epec to have total control over the manufacturing process, taking care of any issues right away. “The shorter the production cycle, the sooner the customer can get it.”
Last year, for instance, the company switched to a central warehousing site in Hong Kong instead of multiple sites, to better track products and get final inspections performed quicker, said Paradise.
Reducing unnecessary steps, a core principle of lean manufacturing, is a companywide goal in which all Epec employees participate. Quicker production that doesn’t impact quality is a value-add for customers, said Paradise, and a group effort.
“It’s the reason we have so many 30-or-more-year employees,” she said. “The CEO’s mindset is always, ‘OK, what’s next?’ ’’
