Scaling up capabilities are very crucial for any PCB manufacturer. When you are selecting your custom PCB manufacturing company, it is important find a supplier that has the potential to scale up with you. If they are not scale up with you then you are likely to run into various challenges.

When you are selecting your PCB fabrication and PCB assembly company, initially when you are just a startup electronic equipment manufacturer, your requirements and manufacturing needs are likely to be low. As you establish your brand through marketing and promotion, your brand will grow and so will be our PCB assembly requirements. When your requirements increase, your PCB manufacturer should be able to meet your requirements. If they do not have adequate capacity to meet your requirements then you would be forced to change your PCB manufacturer. At that stage, you will have to start from scratch by screening your manufacturers, getting quotes and constantly monitoring the quality of the PCBs delivered to you. This could create an unnecessary tension in your manufacturing process and it is not desirable when you should actually be focusing on other core aspects as you grow instead of micromanaging your new PCB manufacturer.

Selecting a new PCB manufacturer is always a challenging process and if you were to select the most dependable manufacturer taking into account their scaling up capabilities, you would not be looking for a new manufacturer when your needs increase. This is where many electronic equipment-manufacturing companies make mistakes. Instead of looking at all these factors, they blindly go for the cheapest quote available.

There are bigger challenges as your requirements increase. It is not just the PCB product but they will have to take care of the PCB assembly process as well. Only an experienced company that could scale up easily will be able to handle the assembly process too. When we are talking about PCB assembly, it also includes the sourcing of PCB components. Often this turns out to be one of the most difficult problems to deal with. PCB manufacturers that have limited experience are not able to source the components and meet the ongoing requirements, which makes them stall the entire PCB manufacturing process. When the PCB production is stalled, this will immediately stall the entire production process in your factory. Therefore, you should take your time to find large manufacturers that can handle high volume orders right at the start. Do not think when you go to large manufacturers they will charge more. You just need to get a comparative quote to find the actual picture. At times large manufacturers would be able to give you a better rate because they have access to better rates for the PCB production supplies including the PCB components.

Until one has the need to scale up, the importance of what we are discussing here is not realized. Now that you know the possible challenges that you could experience, select a company with easy scaling up capabilities.

ChinaPCBOne Technology LTD. is the author of this article on PCB assembly. Find more information, about Printed Circuit Board.

Danny White