Giving back is at the very core of what we believe to be important in our business. We always love to hear about the outcome following a donation or involvement and wanted to share a story from our dear friends in the SMTA Juarez Chapter. Late last year, ScanCAD donated a system for use in one of the SMT-focused programs at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and our hope is that this system will enrich and ground SMT principles for students studying within our industry.
Eduardo Ortiz from USM Reps and the SMTA Juarez chapter was kind enough to share the following details:
“Generally speaking, we have learned over time that there are two key factors for a society to develop and prosper: family education, which enriches us with moral and religious values; parental advice, love of home, and life examples; and formal education, which we receive at school, and which teachers, with dedication and passion, transmit to us in each of the different grades we attend during our student life.
When either of these two forms of education suffers a breakdown, it negatively impacts our socioeconomic environment, unbalancing it and, in extreme cases, shattering it, as is unfortunately the case in our beloved Ciudad Juárez.
How can we help create a better environment? By creating a virtuous ecosystem that systematically tips the balance to the other side, where one of these counterweights is educational development in emerging technologies.
In the late 1960s, our city was the spearhead of the manufacturing industry in Mexico; the big mistake from the beginning was to offer the workforce as a source of cheap labor, that is, to offer low-wage employees to foreign investing companies.
Today, we have 400 manufacturing companies in our city; 40 of which are electronic circuit board assembly companies (SMT), considered high-tech companies, which offer better incomes to all their employees, from operational staff to management. As the SMTA Juarez Chapter, we have the firm purpose of increasing knowledge in this type of industry, so our strategy has been implemented simultaneously on two fronts: creating SMT courses for the four local public universities. We started in 2019 with one university, graduating 32 students with knowledge in SMT. To date, we have four of these public universities in our city offering these courses, and by 2025, we will graduate 350 engineers with SMT knowledge.
The other challenge we launched at the end of 2021 consisted of encouraging these four universities, an Innovation Center and a Technological Training Center to establish SMT laboratories. The proposal sounded unreasonable and impossible, but from our perspective as a chapter, it was necessary and visionary. The proposal was that they would provide the space for the laboratories, and we, as a chapter, would obtain the equipment for them, whether through donations, loans or other arrangements.
To date, we have partially equipped five of these six laboratories, one of the donors being ScanCAD. Their equipment was donated to UACJ at the end of 2025. This February, training will be provided to the teaching staff responsible for the laboratory. We hope that this training will be completed by May so that we can incorporate the use of the ScanCAD system into the practical exercises of the students in the SMT courses during the second semester of 2026, as well as provide demonstrations and training to personnel from local SMT companies, which will add much more value to the knowledge and technology chain in our region.
On behalf of the Juarez Chapter, we deeply thank Bill Loving, Travis Loving and Jeff Rupert for joining this educational vision. Please accept our warmest regards.”
