The Hotrod of Custom PCs: MAINGEAR Shaves Minutes Off Production Time

MAINGEAR traces its roots back to 2002, when CEO Wallace Santos, a Brazilian immigrant fresh out of high school, contemplated his future. Santos was deciding between launching a business centered around his passion for building high-performance PCs or modding and tuning cars. Opting for a fusion of both interests, he founded MAINGEAR to specialize in crafting custom PCs optimized for exceptional performance with hotrod-like flair. The idea spawned out of a private enterprise where Santos would build custom-PCs for family, friends, and acquaintances before really starting to take off as the word spread throughout the tech world.

On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, where technology demands were booming as many businesses had to divert operations to remote models to keep operating as the lockdown ramped up, a shift that put businesses like MAINGEAR on the frontlines alongside health sciences manufacturers as providers of essential products. MAINGEAR ran into an all-too-common dilemma—as demands skyrocket, so too do the demands on their operation. MAINGEAR experienced growth unlike anything they’ve ever encountered in the past, seeing sales skyrocket six times that of pre-COVID figures. Santos’s main concern during this period of rapid growth and increasing sales was how does he scale his business without sacrificing the quality of his products, which was one of the pillars of MAINGEAR’s business model—quality over everything.

MAINGEAR engaged NJMEP, part of the MEP National Network™, to plan and implement a manufacturing process efficiency improvement project in 2022 to address the challenges posed by continued substantial sales growth, doubling their business over the previous fiscal year. After relocating their operations to a new facility that was three times the size of their previous one, there was a significant opportunity to leverage the expanded space for enhanced production efficiency.

Anticipating a further 50% sales growth in 2022, MAINGEAR aimed to rebalance their production lines to meet higher demands efficiently, utilizing pre-configured equipment to streamline operations. To do so NJMEP and MAINGEAR developed a CAD Floor Plan of their current facility, ran a time study of their current operation, created a line balancing table for 4 unique configurations, and developed a more effective floor plan. According to Santos, after coordinating with NJMEP, MAINGEAR was able to reduce production time of their bestselling models from two hours to under thirty minutes, revolutionizing how they’re able to provide customers with the highest quality computer hardware in a fraction of the time.