DESIGN WORLD in
Vision for the future
Charles Cohen President Fotofab LLC
Fotofab Celebrates 50 Years of Serving Industry, and Looks to the Future Fotofab provides a wide range of high precision metal fabricating services to produce components with geometries from simple to very complex. Whether the mission is a quickturn prototype to a high-volume production run, Fotofab has been satisfying engineers for five decades. And while our core competency has not changed over that time, the technology of our production tools continues to evolve. As we look to our next decade, we see opportunities for our customers to benefit from our unrivaled experience. Today, Fotofab is highly regarded by our customers for being responsive to their needs for product quality, quick response times and highly knowledgeable customer service. Located on Chicago‘s Northwest Side, our main plant houses multiple etching machines, and a thoroughly equipped CAE/ CAD department. Our tooling, forming and stamping facility is located in Elk Grove Village, a short drive from our main facility. We are proud to have earned our ISO 9001:2008 certification and are diligently working on our AS9100 certification, which is projected for June 2017 implementation. What changes do we see over the next ten years? Fotofab will continue to invest in the latest technologies for ongoing improvement. Advances in CAD systems will help engineers simplify design tasks and shorten the overall project cycles. Gradual manufacturing refinements will help speed production, while maintaining the company’s well known tight tolerances. We are also seeing greater customer emphasis on environmental issues. Fotofab had anticipated this growing trend and is well positioned to satisfy these customer concerns. We are particularly proud to have been commended by government regulatory agencies for our environmental
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compliance and cooperation. Fotofab believes that to achieve long-term growth, we must be good stewards of the environment. We constantly work toward making our manufacturing process cleaner, safer and even more respectful of our country’s natural resources. Looking forward to our customers’ applications – the trend in the electronics industry is for smaller, lighter and more efficient products with even tighter tolerances. For example, in order to make power supplies smaller, they must operate at higher frequencies, creating a greater need for shielding and heat dissipation. Our processes can satisfy those needs. Be it medical, aerospace, electronics or any other market, customer companies will continue to push out more new designs faster than ever. Fotofab takes pride in being able to stay a step ahead of our customers’ needs with affordable, quick-turnaround custom parts for prototypes. In addition, we are well equipped in moving prototypes to laser production runs. Another area of change is with the types of metals our customers are asking us to fabricate. Exotic metals are required for some medical, aerospace and scientific applications, because of their unique properties. These same properties can be challenging when the metal is etched, stamped or formed. Fotofab has developed proprietary approaches to overcoming these challenges. In summary, Fotofab will continue to maintain close relationships with our customers and advance our capabilities to keep pace with their future needs.
October 2016
10/6/16 1:31 PM