Being comfortable with the status quo is how great companies can quickly fall off. At NCA, we are dedicated to never being complacent with our processes. That’s why we expanded our process engineering team in 2020 and why we continue to tear apart our ideas of efficiency and brainstorm new and more improved ways of working.
A prime example of how NCA reinvents its processes is by taking a deeper dive and looking at our assembly line in action. Who better to look at our processes than one of our in-house process engineers, Ram Gudavalli. He designed two key parts that would eliminate major bottlenecks in our operations and speed up our production time. The first was an additive component cover that would encapsulate important parts that couldn’t be exposed to the conformal coat spray. Previously, when boards would run through the conformal coat portion of the assembly line, our technicians would have to spend valuable time applying and removing a sticky glue-like substance used to protect conformal coat sensitive components. This fixture both protected our board parts and expedited the production process.
The second part was a stand for a high-volume order that would allow our printed circuit boards to remain lifted so that vital thruhole parts wouldn’t be crushed while having components hand-soldered onto the boards. This project was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, so any lead times that we could eliminate for our customers would save countless American lives.
Today, pushing creativity to the extreme is a requirement for advancing humanity. We are in an age of amazing society-changing innovations developing every year. These inventions change the way that we eat, think, sleep, live, travel, work and so much more. The design and manufacturing of these products provides jobs to millions of Americans, putting food on the table for the future leaders of the nation.
NCA is fortunate to work with one of these innovators. We are partnered with a company designing self-driving cars. Companies like Uber and Tesla have begun prototyping and beta testing their own iterations of autonomous cars in hopes of providing the service on a market-scale. NCA’s role in the production of these driverless vehicles is massive: providing critical boards and components that enable the driverless function of the cars. With the weight of human lives on our hands, NCA is proud to be working alongside so many game changing visionaries who are set on changing the way transportation is conducted.
A core practice at NCA is to fuel innovations that create solutions. At the center of every business is a desire to solve one of the world’s great problems, and we have faith that the practices we promote and enforce on a daily basis are creating life-changing results everywhere.