Buy-out brings tier one solutions
20 November 2007
Tim Fryer talks to Gary Howse and Stephen Church about life within the PartnerTech Group a year after its acquisition – and discusses the growth of its development capability and its new-found status as a tier two contract manufacturer providing a tier one solution
While other tier one contract manufacturers have been moving operations out of the UK and Europe, PartnerTech has been increasing its footprint in the region and continues to offer its business-to-business customers the flexibility of a local presence while providing the cost saving and economic benefits of a seamless global supply chain, which includes access to low cost manufacturing.
PartnerTech is now one of Europe’s largest business-to-business contract manufacturing companies with 15 manufacturing centres and approximately 2,000 employees at sites in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, the UK, the United States and China. It offers its customers a full range of product lifecycle services. “We are now an established tier two supplier offering a tier one solution – which means we can really add value to our customers, and, importantly, we can target the larger accounts,” said Gary Howse, managing director of PartnerTech UK (formerly Hansatech).
Rewind one year, to last September, and the Hansatech Group, a UK-based contract manufacturer with sales of around £22 million, was acquired by PartnerTech for the purpose of further strengthening its European presence. “Being part of a company that is ten times bigger immediately gave us strategic purchasing power, a global supply chain, low cost production in Eastern Europe and Asia, and financial stability,” added Howse.
According to Howse, the emphasis within PartnerTech is to offer the full gambit of product lifecycle services – including product design/development, prototyping, NPI, test solutions, printed circuit board assembly (PCBA), full system build, logistics, distribution and after sales – all in close proximity to the OEM’s own facilities. As part of this Group, customers can also leverage the buying power, scalability, material selection, Six Sigma, Supply Quality Assurance Planning (SQAP) and supply chain and obsolescence management expertise that only the larger suppliers can provide.
In the UK, PartnerTech has facilities in Cambridge, King’s Lynn and Poole. Its 1,400 square metre Cambridge plant provides electronic product designers with a fast-turnaround PCB prototyping and batch-build service, while the other sites boast well-established electronic and mechatronics manufacturing expertise, and, between them, nearly 9,000 square metres of PCBA manufacturing, test and system assembly capacity.
“Since our acquisition by PartnerTech, we have strengthened our engineering team and invested in new production and test equipment to ensure that we meet the needs of the large number of telecommunications, medical, aerospace, defence, and industrial equipment companies across the UK,” explained Stephen Church, sales manager at PartnerTech UK.
New product development
PartnerTech places a lot of emphasis on its development credentials and it already has considerable experience of designing and manufacturing products for the medical, industrial, and telecoms markets. “At a Group level, we have scores of engineers engaged in electronic, mechanical, software and system design and industrialisation,” added Church. “Some customers hand over the complete development of new products to our specialist team, while others ask us to improve existing products and prototypes, as well as to design test systems.”
PartnerTech is seeing more and more companies that are looking for an outsourcing partner to assume total responsibility for the complete product lifecycle. This demand is driven by the cost and time to market benefits of outsourcing product design and production to one supplier. “Development and production go hand in hand,” explained Howse. “When they are integrated the entire process speeds up and the total cost per manufactured unit decreases.”
Howse stresses that PartnerTech doesn’t see itself as a competitor to traditional design consultancies – it works in partnership with quite a number - but rather as a one-stop-shop for companies that want an experienced supplier that can take a product from the concept design stage right through to manufacture and beyond.
Medical and biotechnology
This strategic outsourcing approach is becoming popular among medical and biotechnology firms, particularly for early stage companies, explained PartnerTech. Such organisations are keen to engage as early as possible in the design cycle with an experienced manufacturing partner that offers an end to end service that can minimise the risk of costly mistakes, speed up time to market and generally help to deliver a more cost-effective and marketable product. Furthermore, select the right partner and the in-house team is free to focus on their core competences of product development and marketing.
PartnerTech has forged development and manufacturing relationships with many medical and biotech companies. “We produce cardiopulmonary resuscitation equipment for one medical customer,” added Church, “this includes product development, verification, cost-effectiveness, manufacturing, final testing, spare parts and inventory management and distribution.”
For another biotechnology supplier, PartnerTech was engaged to re-engineer a market leading medical instrument that was becoming too expensive to withstand growing competition. “We used our in-house ‘Value Analysis/Value Engineering’ methodology and our considerable mechatronics expertise to lower the cost per manufactured unit by more than 50 per cent.”
Flexible value-add culture
PartnerTech’s expertise and resources for efficiently integrating development, new product introduction and manufacturing frees up resources for customers and its methodic and clear-sighted approach adds value. “When it comes to design, development, NPI and prototyping, customers want flexibility and for their partner to be located in close proximity to the design team’s site,” said Howse.
Howse cites its relationship with Pace Micro Technology, the set-top box pioneer, as a good example. “When its previous tier one supplier closed its UK operation early in 2007, Pace turned to us to provide a fast-turnaround new product introduction (NPI) and prototyping service covering its market leading range of digital set-top boxes.” The business is being fulfilled from our UK facilities in Poole and Cambridge.
According to Howse, Pace needed an experienced outsourcing partner to support its substantial NPI pipeline and it engineers opted to outsource this business to PartnerTech as it wanted a supplier with a UK footprint that could support this level of activity, meet the quality expectations and deliver against the challenging 1 to 5-day turnaround schedule.
“Pace were impressed by the fact that our engineers constantly challenge their processes, that we were flexible enough to incorporate a reworked shop floor layout to suit their requirements, and that we were able to add considerable value during the design for manufacture and test stages.”
Unlike some tier one contract manufacturers, PartnerTech stresses that it is in the UK to stay. Its philosophy, concludes Howse, is all about delivering flexible, value-added product lifecycle services in close proximity to its customers while providing the economic benefits of a global supply chain. Tier one services from a tier two supplier!
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