Imagineering Driven by Customer Demand

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

During DesignCon, I met with Amir Roy, vice president of business development for Imagineering. Amir discussed the company’s high-reliability manufacturing and focus on listening to the needs of their customers. Business is booming and Imagineering is adding new lines to increase capacity.

Andy Shaughnessy: Amir, why don’t you start by giving us a quick background on Imagineering?

Amir Roy: Sure. We've been in business for about 37 years. We do full turnkey manufacturing: printed circuit board fabrication and assembly. We source the components for you; we’re a one-stop shop. We make rigid, rigid-flex, and flex boards. 

We started off doing PCB fab. Then, in the past 10 years, CEO Khurrum Dhanji got us into assembly. On the assembly side, we are a Class 3, ITAR, AS9100-certified shop. You know, we're a very customer-centric company. We started out in PCB fab, but we had demand from our customers asking us to move into assembly. That’s how we ventured into assembly. If the customer demands something, we will explore moving in that direction.  

Shaughnessy: Where are your facilities located?

Roy: We have fab and assembly in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. We have an assembly facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and fab in Taiwan. We also have partners who are throughout the network as well.

Shaughnessy: Does Imagineering have a particular sweet spot as far as technology?

Roy: Our sweet spot is quickturn prototypes. We have no minimum order quantity, so if you want to come to us with just one piece, you absolutely can. That's a niche that we're filling in the U.S. But we also have facilities overseas as well. We have this unique ability to not only give you your prototype work but also scale you up to a production level, whether that be mid-volume or high-volume. But prototype is really our bread and butter and a good entry point for most of our customers.

Shaughnessy: You all do a lot of high-reliability stuff.

Roy: Yes. And for us, our process is such that we treat every job the same way. Our quality standards are AS9100 for aerospace. Whether you're NASA, and you're coming to us for a board that's going into space, or a college student coming to us for a consumer electronics product, we have the same quality standards. Our reliability is great because of this, and our pricing as well.

Shaughnessy: How’s business going for you all?

Roy: Business is great. It's booming, and it's constant. We're building around 50 different part numbers per day. We're constantly working; our machines are constantly busy. With that being said, we do have more lines coming. Our capacity is always pretty open, and we're always looking for new business to fill those lines. 

Shaughnessy: Is defense and aerospace work on the increase? Do you think the two shooting wars going on right now are driving these sectors now?

Roy: I don’t know. But we have been getting a lot more AS9100 work in the last six months. We have a lot of startups that come to us, as well as the established companies, for AS9100 quality boards. We’re FAI (first article inspection) AS9102-certified as well, so we're able to provide that.

Shaughnessy: Are you seeing much funding trickle down from the CHIPS Act?

Roy: I don't know if it’s trickled down to us at the PCB fab and PCB assembly level yet. If it has, I haven't seen it. Really, we haven't seen that conversation with the customer. But as I mentioned, we're bringing in some new lines, basically the same lines that we currently have. I think they're all Mycronic machines, and they should increase our capacity by 20%, I believe. Most of our jobs are quickturn prototype, so they're in and out of our shop in under three to four days. So for us, there's always new capacity coming out. But we want to increase capacity so that we could add more customers and offer that to our current customers as well.

Our CEO, Khurrum, is very forward-thinking. During the pandemic, there was a dip in business, right? But Khurrum did foresee that everything was going to go back up. He pre-ordered the line well in advance, and we have the line now. A lot of people couldn’t get lines.

What’s unique about Imagineering as a business is that we have a young and hungry leadership team. If you look at our industry as a whole, we tend to be on the older side, right? Even our CEO is young for the industry. So, when a customer chooses us, they can sleep well knowing that we're going to be around for the next 50 years. 

Shaughnessy: Is there anything else you'd like to add? 

Roy: I'm unsure if we're going to IPC APEX EXPO; we may attend, but we may not have a booth. That’s still to be determined. We have a lot of shows coming up this year. We’ll be at many of the Design-2-Part shows. Every year, I like to be out and about servicing our customers and also trying to bring in new ones. 

DesignCon has been incredible this year. Many of our customers are on the West Coast, and it's nice to see our customers and see how they're doing. But we haven't seen this type of show at DesignCon since 2019. This is a good time to be in manufacturing.

Shaughnessy: Thanks for speaking with me today.

Roy: Thank you, Andy.