Here are four reasons to buy electronic design services from a contract manufacturer with an in-house engineering team, rather than from a design-only design firm (3:02)
Video Transcript
When you’re making electronic products, sooner or later you’re going to need to buy design services.
Maybe you’re a small company with a great idea but no engineers, or a mid-sized company with some talented engineers but no experience in a specific area like analog or power design, or a very large company with a full engineering department in need of some temporary help.
In any case, you have a couple of options.
One, you can use a firm that specializes in design. These firms will create your design, build a prototype, and hand off a product data package. You take your design somewhere to have it manufactured. Your relationship is over.
Or, you can find a contract manufacturer with an in-house design team. These firms will also create your design, build a prototype and give you a data package. But they have some significant advantages over design-only houses.
Your design services firm has an incentive to finish your design quickly, get paid, and move on to the next project.
In contrast, the design team at a contract manufacturer has an incentive to create a highly manufacturable product, with low production cost – because there’s a chance you will choose them to do the manufacturing. They have personal knowledge of the manufacturing process and will use it to guide their design decisions.
You benefit whether you award the manufacturing contract to them, choose someone else, or do it yourself.
How about an example.
In any circuit design there will be a point where you can implement a function using an $8 sole-sourced IC, or spend an hour to build and debug the same feature with a few dollars’ worth of op amps and capacitors.
A design firm whose responsibility ends with the prototype will pick the $8 IC, and move on. A contract manufacturer will invest the hour to save the cost and headache in manufacturing, so your design will cost less to manufacture.
What else?
You might also pay less for design, since it’s not the manufacturer’s sole or even primary source of profit.
You may get better advice: they only want projects with a good chance of making it to production, since they hope to win this business. If your idea needs changes to make it work, they’ll say so. Your design services firm is likely to give you exactly what you asked for, and charge you again later to fix it.
Finally, fast forward a few years: You have an idea for a product enhancement. You go back to your design services firm. How excited are they to find your design in the archives, remember what it’s about , and spend a few hours to make your changes? Your contract manufacturer might just put in a few hours of engineering time to make your changes as a matter of good customer service, to keep those lines running.
So there are several good reasons to look for design services from a contract manufacturer.