Electronics manufacturing services
field in manufacturing
Electronics manufacturing services (EMS) is a term used for companies that design, manufacture, test, distribute, and provide return/repair services for electronic components and assemblies for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The concept is also referred to as electronics contract manufacturing (ECM).
Many high-volume consumer electronic products have been built in China and countries of Southeast Asia, due to the speed of manufacture of high-volume low-cost electronics in those locations, as opposed to the United States. Cities such as Shenzhen, China and Penang, Malaysia have become important production centres for the industry, attracting many consumer electronics companies such as Apple Inc. Some companies such as Flex and Wistron are original design manufacturers and providers of electronics manufacturing services.
History
The EMS industry was initially established in 1961 by SCI Systems of Huntsville Alabama. The industry realized its most significant growth in the 1980s; at the time, most electronics manufacturing for large-scale product runs was handled by the OEMs in-house assembly. These new companies offered flexibility and eased human resources issues for smaller companies doing limited runs. The business model for the EMS industry is to specialize in large economies of scale in manufacturing, raw materials procurement and pooling together resources, industrial design expertise as well as create added value services such as warranty and repairs. This frees up the customer who does not need to manufacture and keep huge inventories of products.
The public source identifies “Electronics manufacturing services” as field in manufacturing. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Electronics, manufacturing and services.
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This entry incorporates text from “Electronics manufacturing services” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.