New Building Dedicated Solely to Manufacturing

The new building at Cypress Technologies is now fully completed and is operational. This is our second building, and it is dedicated solely to manufacturing. Of the 20,000 sq/ft, only a few offices exist for training, meetings, and breaks. According to Greg Child, “We’ve built a strong bond with our customers over the last 25 years. Quite often our customers ask us to broaden our services, something our existing building could not accommodate especially with the larger, heavier products often seen in the oil and gas industry. Now, with the completion of our new building, we not only more than doubled our manufacturing capacity, but we have a brand new building and equipment that can accommodate those grander sized projects. “The second building shares the same address: Cypress Technologies Corporation 17301 FM 1431, Leander, TX 78641. Along with panel, cable, and through-hold PCBA manufacturing, our new facility has a compact pick and place machine for surface mount board builds.

Lean Manufacturing Initiative

Additionally, the new building allows Cypress to roll out phase two of our lean manufacturing initiative. Almost a year ago, we started a small project to test lean manufacturing. That small project changed the way we run our business. The benefits of lean manufacturing have been realized already at Cypress. We have seen increased productivity, lower costs, less lead times, and better quality. This is especially important to us right now, as we strive to stay a lean machine during the slow global economy.

Driven by the slow economy, Cypress Technologies is also moving research and development resources towards other markets. For over 25 years, Cypress has traditionally serviced the oil and gas market space. However, offshore rig counts continue to fall along with all aspects of fossil fuel for energy. Additionally, the current administration is applying governmental pressures and providing grant money for companies developing products and services geared around renewable greener energy. Since the oil and gas industry may be slow to rev back-up again, we feel it is important to diversify our business now more than ever.

Cypress Diversifies: Supports Security, Medical Product Companies and Military Industries

In an effort to diversify, Cypress has targeted and met with several medical product companies. Additional market expansion is expected in both the security and military industries.

Our push into the military industry is a natural fit for us as they share common problems, designs, and quality levels seen in the oil and gas industry. In fact, we have done 100’s of projects for the military and companies that service the military. The only difference is they sought our services versus us finding them.

Additional resources are focused towards hazard rated products. Approximately three months ago, Cypress launched an effort to design and build ATEX controlled products. ATEX is the framework for controlling explosive atmospheres. ATEX provides standards of equipment and protective systems. It is based on two directive requirements one being the ATEX workplace directive and the second being the ATEX equipment directive. Cypress will design and manufacture products for both directives. Our Quality Management System is established, documented, implemented and maintained in accordance with ISO 9001:2008. Our system also includes Standard EN 13980:2002, which includes POTENTIALLY EXPLOSIVE ATMOSPHERES - APPLICATION OF QUALITY SYSTEMS.

Our quality mission statement is “Excellence through exceeding customer expectations is our goal. Nothing less is acceptable”. Let us exceed your expectations!

Cypress Technologies Implements Lean Manufacturing

Challenge: Try to manufacture in a highly mixed manufacturing environment while reducing inventory, reducing cost, and improving delivery, all while keeping it simple.

Cypress Technologies manufactures products for all types of businesses and industries, and has a strong bond with oil and gas service companies. These companies have unique manufacturing challenges. They need rugged products that withstand harsh environments like extreme weather conditions, debris, and vibration. They also need products that are extremely high in quality, delivered on-time, and they need products that are manufactured at the lowest costs possible to maximize their profits.

Manufacturing products with military levels of quality and at the same time reducing costs and improving deliveries has always been a significant challenge for any contract manufacturing company, one that Cypress Technologies has solved with experience and Lean Manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing is a manufacturing method with a goal of removing waste and maximizing value of the product being manufactured. It is quite simple. Value is something the customer will pay for while waste is not. Lean manufacturing redirects efforts to value based steps and flushes out the wasteful ones.

Cypress Technologies also uses one-piece or continuous flow manufacturing. We do this in-order to make small batches of products. This alone keeps our inventory down, reduces our lead times and improves our quality. A smaller batch also keeps our assembly floor flexible which is what a high mix manufacturing environment demands. With one piece manufacturing, we in effect eliminate over-production a lead time killer. We also identify and correct problems while they are happening enabling us to correct the process and educate the assembler immediately thereby improving our quality.

For each assembly line or work cell, Cypress Technologies has KanBan carts for maintaining sub-assemblies. These sub-assembly carts give our assemblers a visual tool and self-managing system for knowing what is needed to maintain efficient manufacturing flow. It is simple; if the sub assembly is missing build it. If not, build something else thereby controlling over-production a wasteful problem. In other words we only build what is needed at that particular time, and not what is needed is say 30 days from now.

You cannot effectively go lean unless you adopt 5S. Cypress Technologies does embrace 5S. Before we launched our lean manufacturing programs, we trained and counseled with each Cypress Technologies employee to understand the importance of Sorting, Simplify, Sweeping, Standardizing, and Sustain or Self-discipline.

Where do we go from here? While internally Lean Manufacturing has lead to significant improvements that we have already passed on to our customers, we will expand our lean ideas out to our supply chain. We will work with them to adopt similar techniques with their material deliveries and encourage them to do the same with their suppliers. In a perfect world, we want items delivered today to hit the floor today. While this level of flow is difficult to achieve, we feel confident that we can make great improvements in this area to further reduce lead times, costs, and improve quality, so we can pass these savings on to our customers’ while keeping us competitive especially during these difficult economical times.

Internally, we still have yet to integrate all of our departments into work cells. This is mainly due to our facilities change over. However, around April 1st, 2009, our new 12,000 sq/ft facility will be set-up and fully functional which will double our floor space and allow much needed room for our new customers to benefit from our lean processes.