You worked hard and sacrificed plenty to get your product to market. The concept came to you in the middle of the night, or was the culmination of years of research. The prototype performed beyond your expectations and the initial market research was overwhelmingly positive, and that big company you always wanted to do business with has placed an order for 50 evaluation units. Congratulations, you are about to make your first manufacturing decision. Now what?
Well, it all depends on your situation. If you are a small startup, or design house, you are probably going to phone up your contract manufacturer and ask him to assemble your evaluation units, which you have conveniently designed to fit into an off-the-shelf housing. If you are a large corporate, your R&D department hand it over to procurement for acquisition, which would either happen externally through a contract manufacturer or in-house in your production facility (an increasingly unlikely scenario, as the number of manufacturers who actually make their own products can be counted on one hand these days).
Either way, you now have your 50 evaluation units, in all likelihood assembled by a contract manufacturer. Let us pause for a minute at this juncture and examine what value has been added to your product at this point... unfortunately, not much at all. Aside from the obvious benefits of not owning your own production equipment and employing staff to assemble it for you, all the contract manufacturer has done is follow a simple set of instructions to place components on a PCB in a particular order, and charge you for the privilege.
The contract manufacturer probably did between 10 and 15 jobs like yours today; he was preoccupied with his own business, which like yours is the business of making money. This is not to imply in any way that you received inferior quality product. If you are a contract manufacturer in this country, and have been in business longer than five years, you do not make inferior quality product.
Nobody has come back to you and offered you any advice on improving efficiencies, possible design flaws or blatant errors. Would it not be great if the feedback you got was actually helping you improve your product? For example, “We suggest you reduce your panel size to minimise bowing” or “When we were enquiring about the XYZ IC during procurement, the distributor advised us that the package will change in Q2 next year”, how about “You have only left a 2 mm gap to the edge of the board, and we do not see any mounting holes. Does this fit in a rail extrusion?” Simple stuff that you, or even your vastly experienced design team, have overlooked, because let us face it, you have much bigger fish to fry, like perfecting the electronics, writing the software or raising capital.
Be that as it may, you finally have your 50 evaluation units in your possession, and after much trial, error and profanity you have shoehorned them into their temporary housings, loaded the software and sent them off to the customer. Time passes as the customer evaluates the product and amasses a sometimes frighteningly long list of changes and tweaks to the product that he would like to see in revision 2. Subject to the successful implementation of the above changes, the customer would like to place an order for 5000 units, with at least another 5000 units per quarter for the rest of the year. Congratulations, you have got further than 90% of great ideas, but you are now about to make the most important manufacturing decision of your life, and it does not matter what size your organisation is.
If you are a large corporate, you no doubt have a configuration department, who kick into overdrive and immediately begin churning out reams of paper detailing the assembly process in minutiae. They are, in effect, an in-house project management team. If, however, you are a small startup, you are about to embark on the single most dangerous part of your journey. You have spent the best part of a year getting here, you are too scared to even look in your bank account, you have raised enough money, by any means possible, to make those first 5000 units and you wonder how you will live until the customer pays you. You do not have the luxury of a configuration department, and cannot afford to hire a project manager. At this critical stage, you need serious help. One slip, incorrectly ordered component or design error is going to manifest itself over the entire production cycle and you most probably do not have the cash reserves to try again. How much would you have been willing to pay for that advice mentioned at the evaluation stage? How much could a motivated and committed contractor have saved you?
The larger organisation weathers this problem slightly better, only due to the fact that they have better financial and personnel resources. Admittedly the likelihood of it happening to them is smaller, due to the amount of people that check processes, but do not think it does not happen. In the larger organisation, heads will roll, people will be disciplined and maybe fired, but something like that could wipe out the small guy. Throughout this process, the contract manufacturer remains unscathed; he has fulfilled his end of the deal and cannot be blamed for any problems, unless it can be proved that he was negligent or ignored a specific instruction. Not likely, as most contract manufacturers are extremely competent and have been in the business a long time.
What both small and even large organisations involved in the manufacture of electronic assemblies need, is someone to bridge the divide between concept and manufacturability. This has even given rise to a new industry of people prepared to project-manage the process from concept through to production. This can be done by intensive micro managing of every step of the process, or by finding a manufacturer who understands, and more importantly, lives, the process. Someone who has been on both sides of the business, and has made and corrected all of the potential pitfalls of the process.
Such a manufacturer is CZ Electronics. The company’s experience in developing, designing and manufacturing its own complex product for Telkom, mean that it is well positioned to ensure that its customers’ products are produced, tested and delivered to specifications designed in collaboration with the customer and the manufacturer, and is ideally suited to warn and prepare them for potential pitfalls.
All the skills that are currently employed in a large organisation’s configuration department, or are missing from a small operation altogether, are available at CZ Electronics. The company undertakes to get customer product to market at the best possible price with the least possible complications. CZ undertakes to manage the entire process, and will commit personnel, time and resources to it; be it making a test jig, sourcing or designing a housing, loading software, product integration, labelling boxes, printing manuals or delivering to end customers. Essentially, this offering serves to reduce customers’ exposure to risk, as there can only be a single point of failure.
Some may rankle at this suggestion, and think it is not the natural way of things, but it is a fact that the dynamics of the supply chain are in constant flux. Not that many years ago, companies used to design and make their own products, right down to the PCB. After a while they started outsourcing their factory floor, which became the contract manufacturers, then the engineers went, and we saw the emergence of the design houses. Already vast amounts of work are being sent offshore, without even a consideration of the local capabilities, and even more products are being imported that are easily manufacturable locally. It is purely a question of adaptation, one that CZ Electronics is well suited to.
For more information contact CZ Electronics, +27 (0)11 914 5240, [email protected], www.czelectronics.co.za
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