Year 10 Texecom Visit June 2012

Year 10 Electronic Products GCSE - visit to Texecom, Haslingden

For 2 hours our electronic students stepped into another world – the “high tech” manufacturing world of modern electronics.

Texecom are a company who specialise in the design and manufacturing of alarms for buildings and produce a range of products that assist in the security of homes and businesses. Their high-end products are also remotely controlled and or remotely managed, the latter to save the cost on service and repairs.

Our students first met with the company’s design engineers and although comprised of a small number of staff their collective responsibilities where enormous in that they designed, prototyped tested and planned for manufacture of a whole range of alarm products. It was wonderful to see “high tech”electronic manufacturing here in our valley as so much of our modern day products are manufactured in the Far East and then imported.

Students learned directly from Texecom as to why the company chose to do this and in their words “There are real advantages to import components and then use base manufacturing:

- Our customers value that we have the expertise to manufacture in the uk
- Our customers consider our product to be very reliable because it is within our interest to ensure high quality within our manufacturing in order to produce robust and well designed electronic products.
- When we use base manufacturing our end product is only a matter of hours away from our customers, but if we are using far eastern manufacturing our product is at least 5 weeks away from us.
- Base manufacturing provides us with control of and flexibility in our manufacturing to assist us to be competitive in the market place.”

Our students observed the complexity of electronic manufacturing and the speed at which PCB’s are populated by modern ‘pick and place’ machinery.
One machine placed 17000 components per hour with an accuracy of 100th of a millimetre.

It was wonderful to observe the time, effort and systems used to assemble and to ensure product quality and control prior to packaging and distribution and it was a delight to see all this amazing design and manufacturing taking place within our immediate locality.

Thank you to Texecom for such a wonderful opportunity for our electronic students

Mr Fitton
HoD Design and Technology

www.texe.com

Year 10 Texecom Visit June 2012