Following the manufacturing boom of the 1990s through today, there's now literally a world of options in terms of hiring contract electronics firms.  How do you choose between your options?

Picking the right partner is more essential than ever, if you want your electronics design to succeed.  More products are being introduced into the marketplace more quickly, while both businesses and consumers continue to demand higher quality.  Simply offshoring manufacturing to the lowest bidder can easily mean a product that's late to market, and with quality that's not up to par.

Manufacturers today have found ways to cut costs while simultaneously offering more services than ever before.  You can get a lot more for your money, if you look carefully.

In most industries, good inventory management is important.  In contract electronics, it's absolutely mission-critical for products to succeed. 

With contract electronics assembly, your inventory of parts and supplies plays a much bigger part in the overall success of a product, and of your business.  A single bad $1 component can ruin a $100+ piece of electronics.  This is an especially big issue with overseas assembly.  There are plenty of stories of major businesses either not receiving the products ordered or discovering that counterfeit components had been used.  Even the US Air Force fell victim.

Companies today are bringing out more products, more quickly, trying to meet the demands of an ever-growing industry that wants constant innovation.  Are your design and prototyping services able to keep up with that demand?

It's often one of the biggest complaints companies have about their PCB assembly partners.  Prototypes can be slow to develop, as well as expensive, since they require custom re-configuration of assembly lines.  When dealing with overseas companies, this can often involve months of back-and-forth.  

If you've ever wondered how it is that electronic devices can continually shrink in size, Surface Mounting Technologies (SMT) are largely to thank.  This continually-evolving set of manufacturing techniques allows electronics to be created which are superior to alternative manufacturing methods in numerous ways.

What makes SMT different is that it allows individual components to be placed directly onto the circuit board, without the need for sending wires through to the other side.  

No matter what market you're looking to enter, your electronics design needs to be rock-solid if it's going to succeed.  The electronics manufacturing field is booming and still barely meeting demand, so there's plenty of room for great products to succeed.  

But they have to be great products.

Companies still using "fire and forget" style outsourced electronic manufacturing services, which simply build to order, are taking big gambles with their product.  Electronics today need to be more thoroughly tested, better-built, and better targeted to consumers if they're going to succeed.  

Electronics companies in the 90s and 2000s which chose to outsource their production work overseas often found themselves making compromises.  The great distances and language barriers involved often introduced new issues that had to be worked around, often to the detriment of the product, the customers, or both.

One of the most obvious of these -and the most costly- is what happened to post-sale support in the wake of the offshoring boom.   A big change was made to how a lot of companies handled warranty claims: Rather than attempting to repair the item, they simply sent out a new one every time.

Granted, there are cases where this can be cost-effective, but when talking about products that can be hundreds of dollars on the shelf, it's incredibly wasteful to send out new ones when often a single low-cost component is to blame.  

If you haven't recently looked into the advantages of American-based electronics manufacturing, it might be time to do so.  US manufacturers have been hard at work improving their service offerings, to compete in a global market against cut-rate manufacturing options.

America is already a highly-competitive option for electronics manufacturing, and when you partner with domestic firms, you can get services far beyond what most overseas partners can provide.

Of these, the inclusion of PCB repair services and other post-sale support is perhaps the most crucial, as it addresses a huge ongoing cost in electronics that's rarely factored into the initial manufacturing decisions.  Rather than treating post-sale as an afterthought, American electronics firms can bring you a fully-integrated all-in-one solution for introducing new products to market.

 Likely because of the offshoring boom of the 90s and 2000s, there persists a belief that American-based manufacturing is too expensive to be worth considering - but nothing could be further from the truth. According to multiple studies into the matter, in the long term, costs associated with manufacturing in China and manufacturing in the USA are effectively at parity.

Moreover, American manufacturers have been hard at work updating their processes and competing on value rather than sheer cost.  Sure, the up-front costs of a cut-rate overseas manufacturer will be lower than domestic... but that domestic manufacturer can offer plenty of services and long-term value that few, if any, overseas centers could hope to compete with.

A company that means to make a name for itself in electronics, whether consumer or industrial, is under more pressure to perform today than ever before.  The rise of the Internet and social networking has exponentially decreased the amount of time it takes for a poorly-designed product to become known as a lemon.

Previously, a company had weeks or even months before enough poor reviews accumulated to damage their reputation.  Today, it's a matter of days or hours.  If someone buys a poor product, one of the first things they do is tell the world about it, literally.

Manufacturing based on Surface-Mounted Technology has taken over electrical engineering, and for good reason.  Rather than using space-hungry holes through the board, SMT-based circuits have components which are placed directly onto the board, using a solder paste which also works as a glue.

The hard part is the baking that follows.  While there are several possible techniques, the board has to be precisely raised to temperatures in excess of 200 degrees, to properly melt the solder.  Much like when cooking dinner, too little or too much heat can quickly ruin the project.

Modern manufacturers utilizing surface mounted technology use all-in-one devices called Reflow Soldering Ovens to ensure proper circuit boards.  These marvels of engineering can automatically handle the heating and cooling of each circuit board, sending it through a series of internal chambers for treatment.