

The Factory Floor, Part 1 of 4: The Quotation (or, How to Make a BOM) - Danieru
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2776

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chime
I've built many BOM/costing tools for one of my clients who is in the
pharmaceutical manufacturing industry and it is absolutely the most
complicated part of any new product development. The BOM is an all
encompassing contract that should cover not only the parts, specs, and design
process but also the routings, requisition/sourcing schedule,
equipment/change-parts, and internal lead-times. If you have something that is
built over three phases, you have to schedule the material, equipment, and
labor precisely to avoid delays or over-stocking. On top of this, you have to
factor in multiple levels of internal/outsourced testing, warehousing,
shipping/distribution, cost of capital, and account for overhead.

Every time I see a hardware Kickstarter campaign, I wonder if the designers
are familiar with the typical supply-chain-order process. Putting logos on
t-shirts and coffee mugs is very different from contract manufacturing custom
hardware, even if you are outsourcing 100% of the manufacturing and
distribution process.

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nickpinkston
Yea, there are more failed / really-late Kickstarters than you see. It's a
shame, but manufacturing is still super difficult on some budget w/ no time
(and often little experience).

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Danieru
Andrew Huang was one of the engineers behind the open source Chubby. He has
considerable experience with outsourced manufacturing in china and I thought
this post would be helpful for anyone doing outsourced hardware.

His "Made in China" category: <http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=7> is
also a fantastic read. It is rare to see inside the factories that make all
our gadgets so I am thankful he took the time to document so much as he did.

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georgemcbay
"Andrew Huang was one of the engineers behind the open source _Chubby_."

chumby, but close enough! Not the first time someone has called them Chubbys,
sometimes intentionally... there was lots of snickering about the 'Chubby 8"'
product.

Also, I've never heard anyone call bunnie Andrew, even in real life.

(Source: I worked at chumby).

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Danieru
Sorry! I always thought the thing was chubby. The name made sense in my head
as the mascot octopus is a bit gooey.

I was not sure if I could call him Bunnie since I thought that was a nickname.
Is there a chance Bunnie is not pronounced "bunny"? I think there is a chance
I may not be very good with reading words.

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georgemcbay
It is pronounced the same as bunny (as in the killer rabbit from Monty Python
& The Holy Grail) and it is technically a nickname, but I've never heard
anyone call him anything other than bunnie even in a work setting.

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ck2
Nothing against China or it's people but if we keep building it up while it
buys all our debt, this will end very very badly.

Why can we not build up our own ability to manufacture, or Mexico etc. ?

We're making a staggering number of millionaires and billionaires in China.

Plus when you're done giving them all your tedious designs and specs for your
parts, a few months later after they ship your items, clones will appear on
ebay and similar markets. If you had manufacturing a little closer to home you
might have a little more control over that.

Then there are the problems like capacitor death from really low quality
parts. Ever wonder why many electronic parts don't last more than a few years
anymore? Another issue that might be resolved by manufacturing closer to home
and being able to monitor part quality during the entire production process.

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kfk
_Nothing against China or it's people but if we keep building it up while it
buys all our debt, this will end very very badly._

It is really not clear to me how this ends badly for us. If China keeps buying
our debt and we fail to pay back, who loses? It seems to me the buyer loses.

Of course, China will not keep borrowing stuff to us. If you just look at
things like trains, I am pretty sure Chinese will mostly source them from
western companies (siemens, bombardier, ansaldo, etc.).

~~~
new299
Coming for the UK my worry is that you lose almost all manufacturing
capability and shift to financial/services industries. Short term that
probably works out really well financially, long term... possibly not so much.

In the UK, I find it a real effort to find _anything_ made in the the UK on
the high street (and few things even designed in the UK, ARM processors
probably being the exception). Debt is one thing, the loss of
manufacturing/and engineering capability I find more worrying.

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marshray
This information is _pure gold_ to someone trying to manufacture their first
products. It's the kind of thing that's not in books, companies learned the
hard way, and engineers learned from on-the-job experience at said companies.

Also, Dave Jones <http://www.eevblog.com/> has a good video series
<https://www.youtube.com/user/eevblog> that includes things like part
selection, tolerance, and PCB design for manufacturing.

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ChuckMcM
I wonder if you could make these mandatory reading for anyone doing a hardware
kickstarter. Oh and it was the Chumby not the 'Chubby' :-)

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nickpinkston
That, and I think a lot of people trying to grok hardware on their own should
go through this MIT open course:

FUNdaMENTALS of Design:

<http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/FUNdaMENTALS.html>

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_delirium
The post says that outsourcing is the only practical option, but does anyone
have a ballpark of the scale where it becomes worth it? It seems like you need
to have substantial knowledge to pull it off without wasting a lot of money on
errors. I would guess for a run of, say, 10, you're better off sourcing things
more expensively in the US/Canada through some boutique manufacturer, and for
1 million you're better off outsourcing, but not sure about in between.

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eitally
I work in the EMS industry and would be happy to answer any questions about
how we do things.

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raverbashing
Very interesting

It's one thing to design a circuit, another thing to make a product

Major manufacturers can do this more easily, also having their own factories
and partnerships is a huge help.

As such they can prototype internally, know which manufacturers to trust,
their price, lots of support, etc

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GavinAnderegg
I clicked on this expecting an article on Unicode endianness:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark>

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evolve2k
I can see demand for a BOM creating web app here.

~~~
DanBC
There is a demand for software.

It'd be nice if it could import from a variety of weird formats, and export to
those same formats.

It'd be nice if the user could select a bunch of components to include, and
then send those to a supplier for quoting.

Imagine a subcontract manufacturer - they might get some ICs from one
supplier, the passives from another supplier, etc. Having easy to split off
groups of components to send off to get quotes for is good.

Add some minor spreadsheeting to total the money and tinker with the qtys.
(Eg, cost for a one off; a five off; a ten off. Or costs for 10,000 over the
next six months at monthly drops of 1,500 with a big end drop.)

But be aware that there's a bunch of really unpleasant almost-niche software
already out there. It's often a kludgy bolt on to accounting / pay software.

Good Luck to anyone wanting to do it though.

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pstuart
What weird formats would you suggest?

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DanBC
In 2005 I was getting parts lists printed out on a dot matrix printer and sent
via fax machine.

We asked for the spreadsheet file. We got a Microsoft Works .WKS file.

People in this industry are not always computer literate. (A manger had a
parallel port printer. He was unable to connect it to his computer, despite
there being only one connector the cable could fit it, and only one way round
that connector could fit. Other managers wanted drawing documents on computers
rather than paper so they could add changes. Try explaining why you can't scan
a paper drawing and turn it into an auto-CAD file (when you don't own autocad)
and why a gif file just isn't the same.)

They've spent a lot of money on their software. Something like Sage Line 100
(or similar.) So, if you can write something to interface with that list of
weird accounting software you're pretty good.

