ICAPE Group Opens New Facility in Canada to Continue Expansion in North America

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ICAPE Group continues to expand throughout North America with their new office in Canada, explaining the importance of being local to better assist customers. ICAPE Group also goes on to explain how, through the uncertainty of the pandemic, they’ve managed to keep up with the changes regarding transportation, the increase in the cost of raw materials and lead times, and how they’ve best managed to serve their customers without sacrificing the quality of service. 

They have recently opened the newest addition to the ICAPE Group organization: ICAPE Canada. The company has stated that the Canadian market has always been important to it, especially the Ontario and Quebec provinces, and the company felt it was of utmost importance to invest more in these locations. Currently, the company is working on hiring and reinforcing a strong, seasoned team to bring real, local sales and technical support to our current and future Canadian customers.

ICAPE Group has managed to create solutions to the increased cost of raw materials and lead times that it finds to be beneficial to its customers, the first and foremost being the leverage, the Group has on its partner factories thanks to their large volume orders (the ICAPE Group orders around 300 million PCBs per year) and the close proximity our off-shore team of 300 employees is in relation to these factories. Through this, it has managed to build a long-term beneficial relationship with our partners.

ICAPE Group also offers a free consultation to their customers. Its expert engineers can guide them on more cost-effective materials and strategies to reduce the expense of their project and, being the industry’s answer to reducing the number of prototype iterations to achieve production-ready status, are able to move a project along quicker. It also offers its customers a full range of testing and reworks for both bare and assembled boards, and its state-of-the-art laboratory is fully staffed with an experienced technical team who can provide an “approval for use” report with the results.

Not only has the cost of materials and lead times been affected because of the pandemic, but the method of transportation has been affected heavily as well. Restricted travel and increased costs are just a few of the issues ICAPE Group has crafted solutions for; with the increase in transportation costs and canceled flights globally, it has developed a strategic network of alternative responses to maintain the supply chain with ground transport and sea freight.

While air transport is the quickest and preferred method of transporting goods, in this period of uncertainty the ICAPE Group has encouraged customers to consider sea or rail transport. Its consolidation solution offers low costs for these methods of delivery, and they provide a clear and more secure vision of the current and future situation. Several logistic offers are available to cater to the various needs of the clients: consignment stock which allows for flexible payments, restocking ease and shorter lead times, CMI and VMI (customer/vendor managed inventory), two hands-on and innovative ways to manage inventory, safety stock to prevent inventory shortages, and blanket/call-off orders for customers with specific delivery needs.