About the company
A subsidiary of Sypris Solutions, Inc., Sypris Electronics is a leading provider of electronics manufacturing and engineering services for government agencies, the US Department of Defense, the avionics and aerospace community, and defense prime contractors. As a strategic partner for highly complex electronics manufacturing, Sypris specializes in high-mix, low-to-medium-volume programs. The company delivers a full range of customized design, manufacturing, and testing services that address the demanding requirements of modern electronics systems, subsystems, and complex circuit card assemblies. For more information, go to: www.sypris.com/sypris-electronics.

Setting the strategy
Sypris Electronics needed to communicate with customers and suppliers electronically so it could achieve operational efficiency while meeting requirements to maintain security of the sensitive defense-related information that plays a major role in its business. That meant implementing a new electronic communications solution to replace processes that involved manually copying and shipping information on CDs or distributing information via insecure modems or file transfer protocol (FTP).

“Because we do a lot of build-to-order project work for the government and defense prime contractors, it was essential that we implement a document management solution that delivered both efficiency and security,” explains Joan Fuhremann, senior business analyst, Sypris Electronics. “The environment we had in place was too dependent on individual user capabilities and their detailed knowledge of multiple government requirements.”

One of the prime compliance requirements driving Sypris to upgrade its system was the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), a set of United States government regulations that authorizes tight control over the export and import of defense-related material and services. For Sypris Electronics, the regulation requires that it ensure only US citizens view the product-related documents that are used internally and in
collaboration with suppliers and customers.

“With ITAR, we needed a system that would be easy for our employees to use and comply with the law,” Fuhremann says. “But our need to adopt new, more efficient processes went deeper than that. Our employees were doing a lot of manual review of documents and, in some instances, even re-entering data that we had received electronically from customers.”