Bavaria’s Top50 EMS provider, Lacon Electronic, is serious about trying out new designs, making ideas come alive and about giving each person who is interested the freedom to realise their own products. Lacon recently started its own “MakerSpace” in which it offers high-tech to try out, creative thinking and design – for all employees and naturally for interested tinkerers or DIY enthusiasts and visionaries.
The future, being able to print your own ideas in 3D at home or using a laser cutter to cut out or engrave all kinds of different materials and to integrate them into your own complex product prototypes is reality now at Lacon. Here the workforce and customers have access to all technologies and materials they need to quickly rescue the (electronics) world – the MakerSpace makes it possible. “We promote initiative, encourage each person to think and act entrepreneurially, reward the best ideas and basically believe that our employees are the best product realisers in the market”, Dr Ralf Hasler, CEO of the Lacon Group was pleased to say. Through the MakerSpace, the entire Lacon team creates space to think and work creatively. To make clear its own company philosophy, “We realise products”, the EMS service provider is providing 3D filament printers and scanners, laser cutters and Lego Mindstorm robots. Whether an unusual idea for the office or the home, a new product or complex components for box build: there were ideas and approaches to solutions for problems and areas of work, which were so unconventional that the executive management were astounded by the intellectual energy and flexibility. “I never expected such motivation and creativity of our co-workers”, reported Hasler. “This creates an atmosphere, in which consciously examine new technologies and ultimately develop their knowledge practically.” Experts within the company have been found as supporters, for example, whose technical study or profound experience in the high-tech world enables them to actively encourage the thirst for action of the “young wild-ones”. Automation engineering and robotics knowledge is learned soundly and practically, is quickly extended to include specialist areas and is used actively in the Group’s lean manufacturing. In the digitalisation of the industry, even at the first operative level, the management therefore sees enormous potential for further intensifying the innovative strength and technical understanding of its own personnel and to actively put into practice its “realising products” motto.
