Tucked away on the island of Møn off Denmark's East coast is one of the country's oldest independent PCB manufacturers. Founded in 1965, Mønprint has grown with the electronics industry, riding all the ups and downs and transformations that are an inevitable – if uncomfortable – part of any marketplace. True to its innovative origins – it was one of the first PCB makers in Scandinavia to make plated through-hole boards – and under the guidance of its current owner Jan Husen, it has grown into a successful business with well over 500 customers in Denmark, Sweden, Poland and the Baltics, a list that is growing steadily.

What comes across clearly when you talk with Husen is his distinctive pioneering spirit. It's served Mønprint well, and in the face of any entrepreneur's worst nightmare, it even saved the company from closure: “We spent decades making boards for large OEM and EMS clients. It was good, steady business and it worked well for us. Until the back end of 2006, that is, when a large OEM client, for whom we were making special Arlon laminate-based products for high frequency applications, informed us that they were moving all of their manufacturing capacity out of Europe”.

Over the course of three weeks, Mønprint lost its biggest client and 85% of its turnover. It was a disaster, and should have been the end of Mønprint. But the pioneer instinct kicked in, and this extremely difficult period turned out to be an invaluable springboard toward new horizons: “We took stock of what we could offer and decided that, as we had formerly been known for our quick prototype service, we would see if there was any demand in Denmark for our skills,” recalls Husen.

Certainly there were other companies offering similar services, but Mønprint had an added advantage under its belt: 15 years of trading and partnership with other quality quickturn manufacturing facilities around the world. Says Husen: “We have to admit to ourselves that we cannot do everything, so if we cooperate with companies whose special skills complement our own, we can offer the best of all worlds.”

So this small, energetic company teamed its own in-house front-end engineering and quick prototyping skills with its partners' capabilities, and in so doing was able to offer its clients massive benefits in terms of speed, quality, flexibility and price. It was a winning combination, and the start of a new business that has grown steadily since 2007. Clients are numerous and small – Mønprint has learned the hard way that it makes sense to spread the risk – and its numbers grow weekly.

Mønprint analyzes and optimizes its clients' data for manufacture, generating all the data, files and tools necessary to make quality PCBs. For most clients, it also sets up their boards in frames for assembly, and prepares their equipment data. In cases where the client is unable to generate more than partial design layouts, Mønprint will do the rest, ensuring that the information that goes to the production floor and in the final boards is flawless. “We differ widely from our competition here in that we retain this crucial part of the production cycle in-house, rather than shipping it off to a design house in China or India,” says Husen, stressing that only in this way can Mønprint and its clients be sure that its PCBs have Mønprint's quality built into them.

For Husen, honesty is key to a good business. “We must be very clear about the service and added value we are putting into our clients' PCBs. If a customer gives us a well-prepared layout with good data, we tell them that Mønprint can't add any great value, apart from passing the order to one of our manufacturing partners and arranging delivery. In some cases, our clients want us to look after the logistics side, but it would be naive of us to think that we can live off this way of doing business into the future.”

Mønprint's core area of growth is accordingly in adding engineering expertise to complex products such as six-plus layer or flex-rigid boards, high-speed PCBs or circuits that must perform in demanding conditions in high-reliability sectors. And of course, in offering speed, even from low-labor rate regions. “Everything we start on a Wednesday will be in Denmark the following Monday,” says Husen.

To do this, Mønprint has invested over the years in tools and software that support giving customers the best. “Skills and expertise are an essential part of the offering, but they must be supported by the right tools. In 2009, we bought the Ucam front-end editing software, and this gave us an enormous boost in terms of data quality. We took another giant step at the end of 2010, when we installed Ucamco's Integr8tor into our front-end job quotation process”.

It came not a moment too soon. Some days Mønprint receives 25 requests with 15, 20 or even 100 different board types on each, and on other days, it gets none. Prior to installing Integr8tor, the company's engineers generated quotes only after having analyzed each request in depth – an incredibly time-consuming task. “We dealt with the peak days like anybody does – working long hours and queuing the requests until we had time to get to them. It's likely that we lost orders – and potential new clients – as a result. In 2010, we were even turning new customers away. It was a massive and crippling bottleneck.”

Husen and his team flirted briefly with the idea of going to India for its CAM capabilities, but quickly rejected the idea as too risky, and not what Mønprint is about. And this is when Jan Nijhoff of Adeon, Ucamco's distributor in Scandinavia, stepped in with a completely new proposition: “Jan, who knows our business well, told me that Ucamco's automatic design analysis system, Integr8tor, would solve our quoting issues. We have a long history with Adeon and Ucamco, and know that we can trust them. We rely on them for our software and plotting, and have longstanding maintenance contracts with them. We know they are serious and that their products are good.”

Nijhoff convinced Mønprint to send 50 jobs to Ucamco to be put through the software. The results, says Husen, were astounding. It was enough to persuade him that the tool could, indeed, be of value, so he arranged to take delivery of the system. Ucamco spent a half a day setting it up on Mønprint's premises, and it went to work almost immediately. “We were amazed with what we achieved in just the first two weeks. We have bought so much industry software that doesn't deliver, but this does everything it promises.”

Husen was also delighted to discover some unexpected benefits of having the system, the most crucial of which is that Mønprint invests none of its engineers' time on a job until it has become a firm order. “Before, we would spend say, an hour on a quote request without knowing whether we would be paid for our time. Now we don't spend money on anything that doesn't earn money, and that's critical for us,” he says, adding that this is exceptionally good news for Mønprint as it deals with an average of three to five new product types per day. “[And] rather than having to ask for engineering input, our sales manager runs the entire quote process herself, from data receipt to quote delivery. She can even revert to the customer with detailed technical requests if data are defective or missing, even though the vast majority of jobs go through without a hitch. And she does this all from her own computer.

“Of course it can't replace our engineers at the pre-production CAM stage, but it does tell us a lot about the product and even at this stage in the manufacturing cycle, it saves us a lot of time and 'donkey' work by analyzing, filing and ordering the design data, freeing us up to use our skills on the real engineering tasks. Furthermore, we no longer work on jobs containing critical errors.”

The company now runs all its requests through Integr8tor. Quotes are generated in a matter of minutes, so new jobs can be started immediately. The software shows the number of requests in and on hold, and how many have been converted into orders.

The results speak for themselves, as Husen points out: “We no longer lose customers through late quote deliveries – on the contrary, we are now hitting 95-96% customer service in terms of on-time quotes and deliveries, in both our in-house and outsourced production.”

For a business that is handling several complex new product types every day, and whose broad client list means that Mønprint must be fast and nimble, that's no mean feat.

Amanda Gronau is a freelance writer; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. She developed this piece on behalf of Ucamco.