Electronic Product Services Group, (www.electronicproductservices.com) a world-leading programming and IC repackaging house has opened a branch in South Africa.
EPS was founded in 1999 by a group of industry experienced executives led by CEO Mick McCarthy - a former VP in Europe for global components distributor Avnet. The group wished to build a successful technical sales company specialising in component and system distribution and configuration. They possessed a strong background in servicing the needs of electronic manufacturers in EMEA, and had previously worked together in one form or another since the mid-eighties.
EPS is now present in most important markets in Europe and Asia. It has 12 programming centres strategically located in the global centres of electronic manufacturing. Headquartered in Ireland, it has subsidiaries and branches in the UK, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan, four in China and now also in South Africa (Gauteng). EPS says it entered the South African market because it recognised its importance in terms of emerging economic growth and technical innovation.
The staff of EPS is highly trained in all aspects of component handling, configuration and repackaging. EPS has production teams and sales and customer service personnel in each location that can speak the local language. Its global ERP system drives all activities from customer relationship management through manufacturing process, procurement right up to regional financial reporting. It currently programs in excess of 50 million devices per annum and has invested more than 6m Euro in programming and tape and reel equipment.
EPS' customer base includes IC manufacturers, contract electronic manufacturers involved in PCB assembly, globally-recognised brand name OEMs and also many indigenous OEMs that have a desire to outsource non-core activities or who may have a specific requirement to repackage a component into a production-ready format. Over the years EPS has developed strategic relationships with programming and taping equipment vendors and is in daily contact with its business partners to produce customer-specific solutions.
SA entry
South Africa is the newest branch on the map and is headed up by Sandra McGeehan. A native of Gauteng province, McGeehan has extensive experience setting up and running programming centres across Eastern Europe and Asia. She joined the group in 2000 and has played an important role in helping develop its global footprint. McGeehan's adventures in Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania are reputed to be the stuff that legends are made of, and she is now blazing the trail for EPS in SA.
EPS believes that here it is the first in the market to offer the services of IC programming, labelling and tape and reel. On the repackaging side the company has the capability to design a pocket to a customer's component specifications and fabricate the carrier tape. EPS will transfer any surface-mount device from tube or tray onto tape and reel.
Quality standards
All its centres are ISO 9001:2000 approved with some ISO TS16949:2002 approved. EPS has significant experience working in the automotive industry and considers the SA automotive assembly industry to be a good business opportunity and will actively seek approvals to work in this industry.
The value-added services that EPS offers: programming and labelling; carrier tape manufacturing; tape and reel; board debug; board rework; and component crop and form.
EPS has an extensive array of programming equipment that has universal device support, with support for all package types including; DIP, PLCC, TSOP, SOP, BGA, μBGA, QFP and more. It supports all device technologies like EPROM, EEPRROM, flash memory, microcontrollers - PLD, CPLD, FPGA and antifuse FPGAs. All can be programmed and transferred to tape and reel.
Major customers
On the systems side EPS is a franchised distributor for: Finisar - a technology leader for fibre-optic components and sub-systems; Netlist - a leading provider of high density, high performance modular sub-systems solutions; Edge-Core - the brand name of the Accton Group, one of the largest OEM manufacturers of enterprise network solutions in Taiwan.
For more information contact Sandra McGeehan, Elite Electronic Product Services SA, +27 (0)11 764 1181, smcgeehan@thenetsgroup.com
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