Forward Thinking
Manufacturing

At Micro, we pride ourselves on offering unmatched quality and efficiency at a competitive price per part. We’ve built our production workflow to pass on savings to clients at scale, and provide flexibility to meet specific price goals. Here’s how:

Factor 1. Costa Rica

Costa Rica offers a highly technical workforce with a low-cost manufacturing base and centrally located efficient supply chain. This unique combination provides Micro, and many of the world’s biggest OEMs the perfect base of operations for manufacturing and assembly. It also provides us competitive cost advantages that competitors often struggle to match.

Factor 2. Vertical Integration

Because we are vertically integrated, we enjoy the cost advantages that our competitors don’t because we handle everything from raw material sourcing all the way through the entire manufacturing process to assembly. For instance, Micro houses a superior automation team who designs and builds modular and recyclable automation equipment to provide greater savings and efficiency for clients.

Factor 3 – Free Engineering Access

MicroLabs was set up by Micro to specifically address the design and pricing challenges for clients. Often, you don’t possess the internal capacity in your own engineering teams to do everything – we take complex design briefs on board and provide you options to execute, and we also help you drive down cost per part with alternative design approaches.

We strategically identified Costa Rica some years ago for our manufacturing headquarters. It’s turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve made. Costa Rica continues to provide a myriad of benefits for us and our clients.
It allows us to:

• Offer a price competitive product coupled with superior quality standards
• Ship almost everywhere, efficiently and economically from a globally central location
• Easily find skilled workers to scale operations
• Work from a lower manufacturing cost base, and pass on the economies of scale to clients
• Build our manufacturing facility in a unique way, taking advantage of Costa Rica’s climate benefits
• Utilize the region’s most statistically healthy, happy and educated workforce

Predictable economy and pricing

Costa Rica’s economy offers one of the most stable and friendly business environments in the Americas, centrally located for global logistics and with a skilled and affordable labor force. The predictability and efficiency of doing business in Costa Rica provides us competitive cost differentiation that we can pass on to our clients without sacrificing any quality whatsoever

• Predictable economy and pricing
• Costa Rica’s economy offers one of the most stable and friendly business environments in the Americas, centrally located for global logistics and with a skilled and affordable labor force. The predictability and efficiency of doing business in Costa Rica provides us competitive cost differentiation that we can pass on to our clients without sacrificing any quality whatsoever

Proximity to the industries we service

Located in Central America, Costa Rica enjoys ports on both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans as a strategic and central location to multiple markets in which it enjoys bilateral free trade agreements. This enables Micro to ship over 1 billion parts to 39 countries each year.

Political stability & Economy

As the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America, Costa Rica enjoys high living standards, a strong education tradition and an exceptional health system for the region, earning it the highest UN human development index score amongst developing nations. With one of the lowest infant- mortality rates in the world (1.36%), Costa Rica’s life expectancy average of 76 years is among the top in the region.

good company

As the top exporter of high technology in Latin America, many of the world’s most well-known brands have selected Costa Rica to run their manufacturing from, including the likes of Motorola, Acer America, K&L Microwave, Merrimac Industries, Boston Scientific, Hewlett Packard, St Jude Medical, IBM, Experian, Sensor Scientific, Panasonic, Hitachi, Siemens, Conair, Merck, Pfizer, Levi Strauss & Co, Hanes Knitwear and more.

Vertical Integration refers to the collection of multiple manufacturing disciplines under one roof to allow a product to be manufactured completely in house. It’s not a new concept but the benefit gap is becoming comparably larger as modern manufacturing evolves into the next era. Comparative to sub-contracting each of the manufacturing processes separately, there are multiple benefits of note to Micro’s vertically integrated setup.

• Quality enhancement and control (1 team building the entire product)
• Single point accountability
• Speed to prototype, change and correction of errors
• Delivery reliability (reduces risks of delay caused by a chain of suppliers)
• Supply chain simplicity
• Cost reduction and control
• Protection of your intellectual property
• Broader solutional capacity (everyone working together to solve the challenge in house)

We control every part of the manufacturing process from start to finish, providing completely controllable turnkey solutions. From designing and building our own tooling in house to finding creative ways that achieve superior outcomes with tighter cost control, our approach provides options for clients. Single point accountability means that errors are fixed in real time and quality can be guaranteed without relying on outsourced components and sub-suppliers.

Long term pricing commitments require stability in several ways. Some of these are controllable internally, and some require external assurances that a company cannot control. It’s worth understanding these mechanics before trusting offers from suppliers.

Factor 1 – Location & Political Stability

Micro is strategically located in Costa Rica for a reason. We enjoy a global and central location, near to many of our clients, but we also benefit from the security and stability of the Costa Rican economy, and this plays a role in our long-term pricing commitments.

As the only steadily Latin America democracy, Costa Rica boasts the most stable economy in all South America, as it boasts exceptional leadership, flexible class lines, holistic prosperity and strong social indicators.

Factor 2- Economy & Currency

Costa Rica’s economy and currency provide a bedrock of stability from which we can price our agreements, with little margin for error.

The 2018 Index of Economic Freedom states – “Macroeconomic stability, strong institutions, policy predictability, a fairly well-educated workforce, and a favorable stance toward trade and private foreign direct investment underpin Costa Rica’s attractive business environment.”

Factor 3 – Vertical Integration

Micro also safely guarantees long-term pricing contracts through our superior vertical integration, whereby we control every part of the manufacturing process from tooling to machining, prototyping, molding, stamping and assembly. Vertical integration allows Micro to control supply chains whilst ensuring steady access to components and raw materials. We save costs through not outsourcing different parts of the process to sub suppliers with margins, and these savings are passed on to you.

Short answer – Yes. For over 55 years, Micro has been solving our client’s most troublesome problems and creatively executing on solutions that are industry leading. These solutions scale to the millions of parts, demanding very small failure rates, often with critical consequence attached.

Our historical success doesn’t just speak to our capacity to handle complexity, but also our ability to handle complexity at scale. Regardless of industry, difficulty or timeline, our approach is always all-in, looking to find ways to meet deadlines, cost per part constraints and functionality requirements. Our multi-industry focus has sharpened our internal processes to meet the most demanding OEM standards, and our learnings in one industry often provide inspiration for solutions in others.

Many of the case studies you’ll find on our website showcase our delivery of parts into the millions. We have proven ourselves as a vertically integrated manufacturer capable of operating at a large scale for our clients and their most demanding projects.

Micro has deep technical capability across several areas including machining, molding, assembly, automation, rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, stamping, clean rooms (ISO class 8), logistics, vendor managed inventory and engineering.

This deep vertically integrated skill set powers the work that we do, most of which involves complex components at scale. Our tolerances, PPM, certifications and historical track record all speak to our capability in building complex components at scale. Whether the part you need is simple or challenging, Micro has the capability to scale at well above industry standard (PPM).