DATRON Mirotech Case Study

For over 20 years, Mirotech has manufactured test fixtures that allow electronics engineers and developers to test electronic equipment in a controlled and repeatable environment. When testing printed circuit boards (PCB), electronic components, and chips, a test fixture is designed to hold the component in place while it is tested with controlled electronic signals. Because PCB and other components vary so much in size and composition, the test fixtures developed by Mirotech to accommodate them are highly customized and this has resulted in a low volume, high mix production environment.

The company was founded in 1997 by owner, Mirek Koalicki, who had been working for a small manufacturer making test fixtures. He’d become a master of the process even though the tools of the day were somewhat crude compared to today’s technology. So, he decided to start his own business to serve this market and he purchased a used CNC machine made in the 1980’s.

Very early on Koalicki met with DATRON Dynamics, a company that had been started only a year earlier to bring German-engineered high-speed milling machines to the North American market. Koalicki recalls, “I immediately identified DATRON’s technology as the ideal solution for making test fixtures, but I also knew that I’d have to wait until we’d grown a bit more as a company and could afford the equipment investment.”

They built a sizable customer base including Canada’s premier electronics manufacturers such as Siemens, Microart Services, Eberspächer, and CUI and now sheer demand dictated that Mirotech had to increase their capacity. Koalicki says, “It took a while longer than I had hoped, and when we were ready, we were ready in more ways than one. We’d grown the business, but then we had a bottleneck in production. I was excited to be able to go back to DATRON with my predicament, because they had just come out with their new M8Cube technology and I was confident that they still offered the best solution.”