Thursday, December 20, 2012

ABI ELECTRONICS CLOSES $1.3m CONTRACT WITH COLOMBIA


ABI Electronics, our UK supplier of PCB Test Equipment, announces the successful delivery of its largest order to date, supplied to the education sector in Colombia. The end customer SENA is a Colombian public institution focused on the development of professional training programs. SENA chose ABI Electronics for an equipment package with a value of $1,300,000.

Background
Willian Santos, business development manager at ABI, explains: “In most countries, it is evident that companies have become much more conscious about their maintenance processes and related costs. Budget restrictions and the ever-increasing pressure from local governments to be more ‘green’ are driving businesses towards a “repair, not replace” strategy. This is creating a demand for people capable of managing electronics maintenance in a more effective way - producing an increasing pressure on education and training providers, forcing them to keep pace with the industry demands for qualified graduates with strong abilities in the fields of electronics fault finding and repair”.

In Colombia, SENA identified these requirements through their local industry partners but also via the free trade agreement signed with the USA. The research conducted within this agreement indicated that a long downtime of production equipment would have a negative impact on the country’s competitiveness.

Thus, the national directors set about modernizing the education infrastructure through country-wide projects incorporating all disciplines. In order to keep with the slogan “SENA, a world class organization”, SENA turned to worldwide companies with a proven success in education and an ability to provide internationally recognized training.

Partnership
ABI Electronics has long been a major partner of education organisations around the world, supplying proven quality equipment for the teaching of basic and advanced fault finding techniques in electronics. In addition, ABI has formed strong ties over the years with key influential organisations in this sector, including WorldSkills and SENAI (Brazil).
 
A range of ABI equipment was carefully reviewed and selected in order to supply 10 technical schools initially, with a further 15 schools in the second phase of the project (2013). In return, ABI Electronics also offered a complete training package, including IPC 610 (through Electronics Yorkshire) as an internationally recognised certification.

Products
Selecting ABI as a supplier was driven not only by the quality and capabilities of the equipment but also by the extended support that ABI offered during the whole process. For instance, the software platform was redesigned to offer a version in Spanish, which is available “offline” for students to work at their convenience without hardware. Users will also benefit from a training package with a range of interactive exercises (also in Spanish) that can be implemented live using a special training board.

SENA ordered 30 sets of the following equipment package:

This modular package, highly popular in many fields of applications, offers in-circuit functional testing of components for both digital and analogue electronics. Other capabilities include power-off signature analysis and many re-designable traditional instruments, such as a digital storage oscilloscope and a function generator.

This versatile solution is capable of in-system programming and boundary scan testing for JTAG-enabled devices, a common configuration on recently designed PCBs.

The RevEng package enables users to produce professional quality circuit diagrams from a sample board.


Product package (above): SENA ordered 30 sets for their technical schools

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