Having outgrown its previous premises, DDZ Technologies last year moved to a new facility in order to provide the necessary equipment, storage and office space to meet its growing workload, and to furthermore establish some headroom for future growth.
Having outgrown its previous premises, DDZ Technologies last year moved to a new facility in order to provide the necessary equipment, storage and office space to meet its growing workload, and to furthermore establish some headroom for future growth.
Situated at 93 Adriana Crescent, Gateway Industrial Park in Centurion, the new premises boast 1400 square metres of space in total, almost five times the previous building’s 300 square metres. “At first it seemed much too large,” explains the company’ owner Dirk du Preez, “but I could not really find anything in between, and made the decision to go for this building. In the 16 or so months we have been in the new building, we have grown into it, and at this stage are basically utilising all the open space, so it worked out very well.”
Having a bigger space is all well and good, but to expand its manufacturing capacity, more equipment had to be acquired. In late 2016, the company purchased a brand new Autotronik machine with three placement heads, capable of placing up to 12 000 components per hour, in addition to a second-hand Microflex stencil printing machine, to join its existing Fritch pick-and-place machine, SEF reflow oven and wave soldering machine.
“This changed our capacity drastically,” says du Preez. “However, we kept falling short of capacity, and early in 2017 the decision was made to change this. Through Allen McKinnon & Associates we ordered a complete new line, consisting of a Juki GKG stencil printer, a Juki KE3020VAL flexible mounter with a matrix tray changer, and a Heller 7-zone air oven. All of this equipment is linked with conveyors, and we have an automatic loader and offloader in line. This line was installed into our facility at the end of June this year, and has been fully operational since mid July.”
To accommodate the new equipment and make the SMT production area more clinical, the complete area was rebuilt before the new equipment arrived. DDZ also acquired an offline desktop inspection machine, enabling all of its boards to be automatically inspected.
The end result of all this is a maximum placement capacity of five million components per month, giving the company access to jobs that it wouldn’t have been capable of before. This is aided by a huge variety and quantity of feeders, as well as the new Juki machine’s high-tech vision system consisting of a normal resolution as well as high resolution camera, allowing placement of almost any component with great accuracy. A matrix tray server allows 20 trays of the same or different components to be made available.
“At first this investment was just to keep up with our current work load, but work comes and goes, and we now definitely have the capacity to take on new work to help us grow even further in the long run,” du Preez explains. “Our big runs of work are never a given, and we do not have any fixed contracts with specific large customers. We always do our best to keep our current customers happy, but definitely have the room to take on a few more now. And if the need arises, there is room to expand our line even more to up our capacity.”
For more information contact DDZ Technologies, +27 (0)12 661 0728, info@ddztech.co.za, www.ddztech.co.za
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