Sometimes, it just makes sense to keep your business under one roof.
Demand is higher for electronics today than ever before, and at the same time, electronics manufacturing requires ever-greater levels of skill and precision to deliver top-quality products. Older methods of outsourcing different aspects of production are having trouble keeping up with this, as the layers of sub-contractors often cannot coordinate sufficiently well to produce a truly high-quality end product.
Hiring a single-source contract electronic assembly firm can easily result in better products, as well as bringing cost benefits throughout the manufacturing process.
5 Ways Full-Service Contract Electronic Assembly Firms Lower Costs
1 - Surface-Mount Board Optimizations
When your manufacturing partner utilizes the most modern Surface Mount Technologies, it can lead to big refinements in your board design as well as significant cost-cutting. SMT-based components are significantly smaller than alternatives, as well as very often being less expensive. Additionally, SMT designs allow you to utilize both sides of a circuit board, potentially cutting entire unnecessary PCBs from the final product design.
2 - Alternative Component Sourcing
Manufacturing centers which have been in business for a significant amount of time have a huge range of component manufacturers to choose from. Often, small changes in component sources and slight adjustments to the build can pay off with substantially reduced per-unit manufacturing costs, with little or no reduction in overall product quality.
Additionally, a full-service provider can provide a bigger picture look at your component costs. Aspects such as shipping time and fuel, or the availability of spare parts, can be utilized to further optimize your build costs. In a markets where price is always a consideration, small optimizations can bring big price cuts when the product comes to market.
3 - Rapid Prototyping
When your contract electronic assembly service can provide prototypes more quickly and at lower cost than hiring a separate third-party for prototyping, that translates into pure savings. It can also generate additional feedback loops, refining the design, as well as guaranteeing that that final build is an exact match to the prototype it's based on.
4 - Predictive Failure Testing
When all your prototyping, design, and production is handled by one company, this brings increased knowledge and awareness of product issues across the board. Every component can be tracked for likely failure rates, with component buys and system build quantities computed ahead of time to allow for likely post-sale support needs.
This can lower long-run costs by preventing the need for special small-batch orders due to an unexpected defect or high failure rates on a particular component. Buying everything up-front ensures you're getting the lowest per-part costs.
5 - Repairs Rather Than Replacements
When assembly is done overseas, or multiple third parties have different roles in the manufacturing process, actual repair work becomes difficult or impossible to achieve in a timely and cost-effective fashion. Unfortunately, this leads to huge waste, as entire replacement builds have to be sent out when a single component is likely at fault.
A manufacturer equipped to also handle post-sale support generates cost-savings throughout the support window, by lowering the per-customer costs for any warranty claims.
If you're looking for a better way to bring electronics to market, ZenTech has the solution. Contact us today for a full consultation on how single-source manufacturing can make your products better.
