Taking “focus” to the extreme can mean giving up SMT assembly too.

Narragansett Technologies lives the philosophy it espouses to its customers: Focus on core competencies and outsource everything else. Narragansett Technologies and its two divisions, Narragansett Imaging and Narragansett EMS, originally made a name for itself in the digital imaging market as a division of the Philips Components group, designing and manufacturing medical camera tubes and digital imaging modules. This group even won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development – the result of an invention of a product that improved television image quality.

Today the Narragansett EMS division is focused on high-mix, low-volume manufacturing of digital imaging systems and subsystems. Applications and products include medical, biometrics, defense, traffic control and professional imaging. A majority of the business is centered on diagnostic medical imaging subsystems products and its complex assembly and test requirements. Narragansett EMS’s business model focuses on core competencies and outsourcing board-level manufacturing.


The model developed as the division and its imaging business customers began to understand what a significant portion of the total system functionality Narragansett’s products were providing. This led to the realization that the additional tasks performed at the customer’s site were not adding significant value and would be better performed at Narragansett EMS’s facility as the imaging products were assembled. The company’s success building higher-level systems led to winning an increasing amount of work for system builds not based on its own imaging modules.

This business model benefits customers since the logistics behind procurement and assembly of many specialty parts are placed in the hands of a specialist in that field. The advantages include:

• As an EMS company, Narragansett is able to offer its customers the typical benefits associated with a traditional contractor: assembly services, product lifecycle management, supply chain management, manufacturing engineering and order fulfillment.
  
  
• By focusing on the large (and growing) diagnostic medical imaging market, the company is able to offer more specialized testing associated with this field, such as image quality testing or x-ray imaging. In almost every case, this testing is too specialized to transfer to a traditional EMS provider cost-effectively.
  
  
• Similar to the testing advantages, the company is able to offer economies-of-scale in specialized components that would not be possible in a company making a wider range of product types.
  
  
• The Narragansett Imaging arm of Narragansett Technologies is able to offer design services for products that are exactly aligned with those made by the EMS group. This partnership permits Narragansett Imaging to offer fully outsourced product lifecycle management from product design to end-of-life support.

To remain efficient, the company remains focused on the areas where it is able to add value. This means that while specialized assembly and test are performed in-house, more generic functions can be outsourced; this is why this EMS provider doesn’t build boards.

Subcontracting Challenges

While Narragansett EMS’s business model comes with challenges to the company, it offers many benefits to its customers. Using subcontractors to perform PCB assembly increases the vigilance needed to ensure on-time delivery and quality. Therefore, Narragansett Technologies has implemented a quality management system certified in both ISO 9001 and ISO 13485, providing a framework for managing suppliers, improving traceability, and closed-loop process effectiveness and feedback. Supplier selection is a strict process of comparing product needs to supplier’s capabilities. This is based on volume, quality, complexity, cost and other core competencies. The customer then realizes the cost savings of not holding inventory of non-critical items and is also offered security of having previously qualified supplier readiness.

The company has evolved to provide NPI services, full-scale manufacturing and complete order fulfillment. Oversight of this complete cycle is an advantage in that a low-volume new product can be managed in the PLM system and then later transferred into volume manufacturing either in-house or to a subcontractor. Customers benefit by having a seamless transition, strict control of product changes, and the cost reductions afforded by the lowered cost of managing complex parts within the PLM system.

Since Narragansett EMS is solely comprised of manufacturing and fulfillment services, the customer benefits from low-cost manufacturing attributed to low overhead. The manufacturing company maintains a staff of engineers focused on documentation control, lean process implementation, test automation and training. These manufacturing engineers are involved from the day the program manager begins the project plan. However, since Narragansett Imaging is a partner, the EMS company can tap into the engineering resources of the design group to offer design support, DfM and troubleshooting without the increased overhead of development engineers fully staffed in EMS.

Case Study

As a longtime supplier to a leading medical equipment manufacturer, the company was able to employ its model to support the transfer of low-volume products to its EMS division. Both Narragansett EMS and the customer assembled project teams to ensure rapid response to any issues. The Narragansett EMS team traveled to the customer site regularly to gather documentation, receive hands-on training of unique equipment and manage the transfer of suppliers and inventory. The company was able to complete this transfer and begin manufacturing and testing within three months.

By outsourcing its low-volume, high-mix products, the customer was able to free up much needed manufacturing space for its new products without sacrificing the supply of the low-volume products to end-users. Narragansett also took over the supplier base, inventory management and order fulfillment processes. It is now in the process of converting many old PCB assemblies to RoHS-compliance and is setting up a repair depot for defective products returned from the field.

By providing these services, Narragansett EMS is able to provide a complete package to its customers: product design, assembly and test, and post-manufacturing support.

Dawn Poirier is director of program management at Narragansett EMS (narragansett-tech.com); dawn.poirier@nimaging.com.