Mack Technologies Inc. (Westford, MA) is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Mack Group (Arlington, VT). The company manufactures printed circuit board assemblies and provides systems integration services for the military, medical, telecommunications, computer, aerospace and industrial controls industries. In addition to its Massachusetts plant, the company has facilities in Melbourne, FL, and Juarez, Mexico.

Recently, the company served as a development partner with Valor Computerized Systems Ltd. (London) as the latter put the finishing touches on its new vPlan production management software system. Following the trial period, Mack Technologies was pleased enough with the system that it decided to implement the system company-wide.

“Mack Technologies has already seen strong improvements through deployment of Valor’s software in the past, and now vPlan…takes that further by providing us with a higher level of automation and functional integration than ever before,” says Mack Technologies Vice President of Technical Operations, Steve Barbera.

“We consider our strength to be in our ability to provide customers with quick time-to-market for complex printed circuit boards and box builds,” Barbera says. “vPlan’s ability to auto-generate machine data on the fly for multiple machine types saves us a significant amount of debug time on the production floor, improves our SMT line efficiency, and makes it extremely easy to adopt new SMT machines and transfer jobs between lines and even sites. Having this high level of automation without having to sacrifice flexibility is virtually priceless. It allows us to focus on our business-critical functional workflow rather than deal with low-level scripting at the CAM level.”

The latest in a series of software management products, vPlan provides a complete engineering system that incorporates everything from digital design to production. The system features tools like “learning libraries,” and is capable of producing manufacturing process definitions with optimized output and documentation for assembly machines and manual workcells.

In terms of installing the new system, Barbera says, “Implementation of new products often encounters resistance, but…this wasn’t the case with vPlan. The product is fast, friendly and its sheer technological innovation was enough to make everyone want to work with it. In addition, we had Valor’s support staff to back us every step of the way, which is very important when you want to make such significant moves while minimizing the interruption to your daily operations.”

For more on surface mount production software, call 949-586-5969 or visit www.valor.com.

For more on electronics manufacture, visit www.macktech.com or call 978-392-5500.