Schleuniger adds benefit to Northcomm Technologies’ slogan, “We Make the Connection”
Northcomm Technologies, located in Plano, Texas, designs, develops, and implements land mobile radio equipment. They are dedicated to providing customized solutions for mission critical radio communication needs. The company launched in 2014 in a small New York City apartment. In that time, they’ve grown from a small sized hobby business to a national provider of top tier radio communication products and solutions. The company’s customer base currently includes branches of the US Federal Government, Motorola, and countless state and local entities.
The wire processing element of Northcomm Technologies Group focuses on the manufacture of multiconductor low voltage interconnects for land mobile radio communication infrastructure products. Their wire harness assemblies add value to mission critical network providers as they no longer have to create unique or low volume harnesses in-house. Their customers have easy access to top quality interconnect and wire products that are typically made to order. Some of their applications include police and fire repeater stations, radio subscriber interconnect products, and OEM cable harness assemblies for Land Mobile Radio Manufacturers.
As Northcomm Technologies’ product line increased, so did their need for operational efficiency and error prevention. According to Senior Director of Product Development, Mark Danon, “We started our business with a single wire harness design that was cut, stripped and terminated by hand, using specialized hand tools. This process was slow, tedious, and led to wasted product.” After their research, Northcomm Technologies believed that Schleuniger offered not only world class leading products, but class leading pre- and post-sale product support. “People using hand tools make mistakes, Schleuniger equipment does not.”
Shortly after purchasing the EcoStrip 9380, Prefeeder 2200, and Unistrip 2300, Northcomm Technologies successfully reduced their cable production process time by 77.0%. However, time was only one aspect of their physical savings. Northcomm also reduced waste of cable and wire by about 10%. Before automating with Schleuniger products, it would not be uncommon to waste and discard one in every 15 wire harnesses along some point in quality control. “We now only find defects in about 0.7 out of 100 assemblies and typically those are traceable to assembler error and mishandling”, says Danon.
Additionally, the S.ON user interface in the Ecostrip 9380 allows Northcomm to save wire types and profiles for their catalog products. They have the ability to load the material, run the product and rapidly move to final assembly. This precision and repeatability is key to their success.
Schleuniger products have not only become useful to Northcomm, but have become integral to their overall processing system and have immensely added to the efficiency of their production time.
Northcomm will additionally purchase a Unicrimp 200 to their wire processing facility as well as a coax processing machine by the end of 2018.
With the addition of Schleuniger’s wire processing machines, Northcomm Technologies finds ease in being able to precisely “make the connection”.
