EPAC as a company would not be what it is without its very dedicated and highly qualified staff. We are proud of the people we employ, and our people are equally proud of the work they do. That's why, regularly over the next few months, we'll be featuring one of our staff members to talk about his or her experiences within EPAC.
Responsible for work preparation, purchasing and quality management is 31-year-old Iva. Because her work as a lawyer did not make her happy (she is a law graduate), she moved with her husband to the Weert region. She started at EPAC 3 years ago as a summer employee but quickly managed to work her way up as a vital link in the organization.
Three months after joining the company, she was already partly responsible for purchasing and by the beginning of 2019 had already risen to the position of Purchasing Manager. That Iva picks up business with tremendous ease is demonstrated by the ISO-9001 certification that the company achieved in April 2019. "Arno, decided in December of the previous year that he would like to achieve that," says Iva. "We started preparing the documents, and because many things were already going according to the quality management requirements of ISO-9001, the audit meant for that went very smoothly, and we can call ourselves ISO-9001 certified since then."
It is not only in the area of procurement that Iva proves invaluable to EPAC. Since 2019, she has also been the work planner and takes care of internal security. "That mainly means that I determine what access rights people have," she laughs modestly. "I determine who is responsible for certain things and what access to the systems they need for that. The external security, such as the security of the systems, lies with someone else. Everyone here has their expertise, but that's what makes it such a nice company. It feels like family, and everyone likes to put in their best effort and constantly tries to see where they can improve things."
That those are not big words is evident from several of EPAC's ambitious plans. For example, the company is integrating a new Pick&Place machine that will allow them to produce prototypes by machine more easily.
It has not been silent in the area of quality certification either. After successfully obtaining the ISO-9001 certification, the idea soon arose to obtain an ISO-13485 certificate for the production of medical devices. "Until the summer of last year, that was mostly a nice idea, and we weren't very actively working on it," Iva says. 'Corona did accelerate the whole process. We also noticed that more and more customers were requesting it. So I started making an overview of what we needed to do. The most important thing was to restructure some administrative tasks and to add some special cleaning routines. For us, it was therefore not a matter of an entirely new process but additions and improvements to our existing ISO certification. I am confident that the external audit next week will go well!"