Since its launch in 1986, Seica has developed a range of test solutions aimed at meeting the specific needs of the electronics manufacturing and service industry. Bernd Hauptmann has assumed the position of Seica’s Sales Manager for Central Europe, based in Munich. Hauptmann started his career as Design Engineer for a few years and later he worked more than a decade as Application/Test Engineer in the semiconductor industry for Advantest and Teradyne. After testing semiconductors, Hauptmann changed to the sales side of the assembled board testing industry. In the past 15 years he has worked as Sales Manager for the leading ATE suppliers, including GenRad and Orbotech. With his strong background in the ATE business, he is well prepared to take on the responsibility of increasing Seica’s business in Europe’s biggest market. EPP Europe spoke to him about his plans.
Mr. Hauptmann, congratulations for your new position as Sales Manager for Central Europe. What strategic importance and purpose does 2007 have for you?
By the end of 2007 the brand name Seica will be known to the Central Europe Market with its leading products in the ATE business. With the new products we’ll strengthen our business in this important market.
What are your goals for the next two years and in the long run?
To establish a strong sales and service/support organization in Central Europe in order to give our customers state of the art solutions for manufacturing their products in the highest quality for a competitive price. We want to listen to our customers to understand their today´s needs as well as future requirements in order to develop the best solutions for this innovative and challenging market facing them at present.
How are you going to achieve this? What is your approach?
We’ve already established a business partner organization in Central Europe with excellent market coverage. This business partner has a very close relationship with her customers in her area. We also have built a partnership with Digitron Engineering Services in Munich. Digitron will provide the service and application support for our products out of the newly established Demo and Support Center in his firm. In these rooms we’ll have all of the Seica products including a repair stock to guarantee a short response time in the case of a service call. Very important for us is to achieve these goals by increasing marketing activities.
What are the company’s primary areas of focus?
Looking at the German market, it’s immediately clear what area we must focus on – this is the automotive and the machinery market with all their suppliers. Many countries in Europe have subsidiaries and products of German companies which we also service.
Seica has recently entered the field of selective soldering with the advanced laser-based Firefly system. What are your expectations?
The selective soldering market is a very small market, but it is also very specialized. The automotive industry has an especially strong demand for tightly controlling all the production processes, and acquiring all process data for traceability reasons. With the FireFly, customers have full control over all solder parameters, and also have an automatic archiving procedure for these parameters. There is also an increasing demand from other industries which have to fulfil traceability requirements. With the FireFly we can completely meet this demand of process stability and repeatability over a full production day.
Concerning Firefly, in which field are your customers?
2007 will be the year in which we target the automotive and the machinery markets where we see the biggest demand.
Could you give us some information about Seica’s historical background and its company profile?
Founded in 1986, Seica S.p.A. is a global supplier of automatic test equipment with an installed base of more than 800 systems on four different continents. Seica offers a complete line of test solutions, including bed of nails and flying probe testers which are able to perform MDA, in-circuit, functional and optical tests of loaded boards, second and third level electronic modules and printed circuit boards. Headquarters is located in Strambino, Italy, with offices in Paris, Salem/New Hampshire, USA and Suzhou, China. Since 2006 we are also in Germany, along with a worldwide distribution network.
EPP Europe 402
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