Electronics manufacturing as a passion User Report AXON
AXON Electronics and Ersa cooperate on modernization of production equipment
The Munich Metropolitan Region is one of Europe's leading and most dynamic economic areas. Global players such as Siemens, Roche and BMW are based here, as are numerous small and medium-sized companies from trade to high-tech. The Greater Munich Area also has a large start-up scene. This environment could not be better suited for AXON Electronics, as the EMS provider specializes in prototypes and small to mid-volume series.
Frank Schlotz founded the company in 1997. It counted nine employees in its starting years. In 2002 AXON moved into their newly built premises at their current location in the town of Inning am Ammersee in the south of Munich. Martin Mader, a trained wholesale and export merchant and qualified IT specialist with a degree in business administration, had been in charge of the IT at AXON on a part-time basis in addition to his full-time job. This is how Mader and Schlotz got to know each other. In the search for a suitable successor, Frank Schlotz offered his busy IT specialist to take over the company. “I wasn't even in my mid-20s at the time, and I had no money or securities. But I knew that if I didn't give it a try, it would keep me occupied for the rest of my life. So, I finally said yes,” Martin Mader recalls. The business plan was written, and financing was finally secured. AXON Electronics e.K. was transferred to Martin Mader on May 1, 2014, after a transition period of one and a half years during which he familiarized himself with the business processes and the industry, which had so far been completely foreign to him. Since then, the workforce has grown to 30 and an additional building was needed, which was occupied in January 2020.
AXON focuses on the assembly of printed circuit boards (THT or SMD), with an emphasis on the development and production of prototypes and small production lots (up to 3 million components per order). The customer structure is clearly oriented towards SMEs, which are of no interest to the large EMS providers. “We like to work in the prototype sector, but with the aim of taking over series production later on,” explains Martin Mader. As customers include companies from the sectors aerospace, medical technology, metrology, photonics and special mechanical engineering, AXON is committed to highest standards, and is therefore certified to ISO 9001 and the medical standard ISO 13485, among others. However, the associated process management and infrastructure cannot be financed with prototype production alone. “Series production is necessary to ensure the company's growth,” Martin Mader explains.
The trickier – the better
The intensive exchange with customers and working together as equals is the core of AXON’s corporate culture. These are decisive aspects to the AXON team in order to be successful in daily competition. To meet price and cost pressure AXON relies on efficient and state-of-the-art production processes which limit manual work to a minimum. “Considering the cost, regions like Eastern Europe and Asia will prevail if an assembly requires a lot of manual work,” Martin Mader says. Therefore, AXON optimizes layouts for machine production, which guarantees a mutually beneficial cost structure. “The confirmation and highlight of our work is that customers are now proactively approaching us and ask for production optimization. This direct communication and tinkering with the perfect solution for both sides is what we love about our job,” says Martin Mader. Today, about 90% of AXON’s sales are generated with customers who are located within an hour's drive of the company's headquarters. Thanks to the short distances, AXON can also be reached quickly in person to discuss issues on site and solve any problems that may arise.
Success factor: modern equipment from strong partners
What all EMS providers have in common is that they are confronted with new market challenges very quickly. Therefore, an important part of AXON's business strategy is a modern machine park that covers the wide range of components to be processed. This extends from fine-pitch elements to PCBs with thick copper layers and many THT components. In the SMD area components from 70 x 70 mm side length down to 01005 chips are processed.
In 2023, the THT selective line was due for modernization and a new reflow oven was to be purchased. In their search for a suitable partner, the consultants at Paggen GmbH finally made contact with the Wertheim-based soldering machine manufacturer Ersa. Paggen GmbH originally specialized in production equipment for prototypes and small series. Today, the sales representative and process consultant also offers placement machines, solder paste printers and soldering systems. “We have been working with AXON for a long time,” explains Managing Director Sandra Paggen-Breu. “It started with the delivery of microscopes. This was followed by an Ersa HR 550 rework system. Ersa and Paggen have been cooperating successfully in the area of rework, paste printing and reflow in Southern Germany for many years.
After evaluating different selective soldering systems AXON opted for an Ersa ECOSELECT 4. This compact machine is operated in batch mode at AXON, and it is linked with a handling system with PCB storage. An automatic filling level control of the solder bath, regular fluxer and solder nozzle tests as well as the automatic nozzle cleaning provide for reliable and repeatable processes. Solder processes are recorded and documented in the machine software, which is particularly important in the quality assurance of medical technology products. In addition to the reduction in weekly maintenance time from four to five hours for the previous system to less than one hour for the ECOSELECT 4, the machine software is the biggest highlight for Martin Mader, a trained IT specialist: “ERSASOFT makes machine operation intuitive and very easy. In particular, creating soldering programs with the integrated CAD Assistant 4 editor, which can process Gerber data without me having to convert it to a viewer format such as DXF, makes the process much easier. My people have learned to use the ECOSELECT 4 very quickly.”
Wanted: a compact and powerful reflow oven
One of the main criteria for the purchase of the new reflow oven was very pragmatic: due to the local conditions, the SMD line could not be longer than 17 meters. As a result, the company was looking for a compact reflow system with the highest possible throughput and output. The technical challenge was the assembly to be soldered and the speed of the pick-and-place machine. The top side of the board is densely populated with many different components; the bottom side has only a few components. Every 14 seconds, a board leaves the pick-and-place machine. Is the time the board spends in a short reflow oven sufficient to reliably create all the solder joints? It was a logical step for AXON to contact Ersa. With the HOTFLOW THREE 16, Ersa has a compact and powerful 8-zone, 5.60m-long reflow system in its portfolio that met the requirements.
The combination of gas flow, energy absorption and energy transfer to the product is essential for a perfect temperature profile in the reflow process. The control unit of the HOTFLOW THREE - the so-called SMART CONVECTION POWER UNIT (SCPU®) - together with the special design of the nozzle plates, ensures homogeneous heat distribution across the entire process zone without shadow effects - even with complex, densely populated PCBs with different component sizes, as in this case. The single process zones can be controlled individually, allowing perfect adaptation to the requirements of PCB materials and solder paste, thus ensuring high soldering quality. The system is extremely economical in its consumption of electricity (up to -10%) and nitrogen (up to -25%). Ease of maintenance was also an issue: with the HOTFLOW THREE 16’s special three-stage cleaning system consisting of Smart Elements® granulate filter, pyrolysis and condensate separation, maintenance intervals for the HOTFLOW THREE are significantly longer. AXON still had a clean process tunnel after three months of single-shift operation.
For the colleagues at AXON, the intuitive operation of the HOTFLOW THREE 16 is once again unbeatable, because the software of all Ersa systems - from wave to reflow to selective - is based on the consistent software concept of ERSASOFT 5, which means that an operator can quickly find his way around different machines.
“Our customers, and especially those from the medial technology sector, appreciate the high level of modernization we have here at AXON. Thanks to the modernization in the selective and reflow area, we are ideally equipped to optimally meet the future requirements of our customers,” emphasizes Martin Mader.
