Bad advice to a contract electronics manufacturer

There is such a service, contract manufacturing of electronics: you come with documentation - you get the product. The service includes the purchase of components, their acceptance, production and installation of boards, testing, final assembly and delivery. Production of cases and machining for contract soldiers also happens, although not everywhere.

Production can be taken as a full cycle, and for individual work, such as soldering, when the Customer ships the boards and components for them as customer-supplied raw materials. In Russia, such services are provided by very different companies — with or without a special receipt, large, medium, small, garage tinkers, sometimes even without their own production facilities. The market is very competitive, production is underutilized, the service is more or less standard - it would seem that everything is there for the rapid development of customer-oriented service.

I'll tell you about this service through the prism of our experience, in the form of harmful advice to a contract contractor. The image is collective, all of them are a little ridiculous. If you recognize yourself - a good sign, because you have received invaluable feedback and can become better. Some tips will be good for other services, use!

Receiving order.

1. Everyone wants to work with you. Yes, yes, because only you are lucky enough to become owners of the Assembly Line. Do not rush to respond to letters, the client will wait.
2. Develop a unique form of receiving an order, but not any, but in Excel. Add to it more beautiful multi-colored design and drop-down lists with unsuitable options. It's nothing that all this data is in the product documentation, because it’s more convenient for you to work with the same requests. If the client resists and does not want to fill in - ignore him, he is to blame. He will be back with a filled form and a guilty look.

Negotiations and pricing

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1. Never tell the customer the structure of the price of their services, because then he may think something is not right! Enough of one digit. Justify her with a story about an unprecedented quality, not like the others. If you nevertheless descended to the separation of services and purchases by different cells in the commercial offer - never reveal any more details. Let the Customer himself wonders how to reduce costs, it is not your concern.
2. In his pathetic attempts to save money, the Customer again makes changes to the documentation, changes the batch size back and forth, in every possible way delays the deal? Just give him time to think, but for now write what to refuse to do the calculations, or rather just ignore him. Let him think first and then write to you.
3. If for some reason you were not given a contract - call the Customer and tell him everything you think about him, preferably in a rude manner. Then offended hang up. The market is huge, no one will ever know that you did so.
4. If the Customer could not immediately call the target cost price - it means he is a sucker, safely multiply the price by 2.

Timing

1. If the customer wants quickly - promise that it will be fast. Then you can always say that it was a joke.
2. All deadlines come out - never call yourself. Let the customer call, because in this way he will show weakness and dependent position, and you can efficiently explain to him how long to wait. He will apologize and promise not to bother anymore.

Quality assurance

1. Tell all customers how you have quality. This is the work on quality. Only unsure losers keep statistics on marriage.
2. Optical control, X-ray and other expensive toys are designed to dust the brains of naive customers. Real quality is guaranteed only by honest eyes and good hands of Galina Nikitishna from your manual Quality Department. Repeat this to everyone more often, so that you can believe it yourself.
3. Never check what files were sent to you there for production, do not offer corrections to improve manufacturability, run as is. Let the customer pay for his own stupidity.

Themselves are also good - a little about the customer.

1. Work only with your production, it is good, because yours. It is also close. If your production can not in some technology - then it is from the evil one and in the development to apply it is not worth it.
2. Change documentation more often in the process. It does not matter that everything is already running, you know what else it is quite possible to manage to move that resistor!
3. If your products that are in good condition for an unknown reason, are massively burned during testing - boldly ship everything back to production, let them understand it. As a problem, indicate something like “the KHF-32 indicator is not on the stand”. Schemes and techniques do not show - because it is your trade secret

PS: Actually, we are friends with the production, basically they are great guys, do not think.
Just always want better. The client and the customer are a mirror image of each other, like twins who live and mature together.