Rough Guide to Outsourcing In China

zentec writes, "An article in Design News chronicles WiLife's outsourcing project to China (they make consumer surveillance cameras). It's a tale of a language barrier, misplaced EEPROMS, backyard engineering, incorrectly assembled parts, sloppy engineering, and flaring tempers. That, and an initial defect rate of nearly 80%." In the end WiLife seemed happy enough with their outsourced manufacturing. This is a nitty-gritty account of life under globalization.

Comments

And this is surprising?

[Jhon]

From the article's author:

In CM's defense, this is the most complex PCA they have manufactured to date. It pushes the limits of their capabilities. The main PCA contains three BGAs and several high pin density surface mount devices. The bulk of CM's output is fairly simple mice and game controllers. CM top management wants to work with WiLife because it forces their factory to enhance their capabilities.

The author himself says they went with a firm that had never worked on anything more complicated than mice or game controllers. Of course they were going to encounter problems. And it looks like they were OK with that with the deal they were getting...

China

[TheRecklessWanderer]

We test stuff from China. Most of it we don't buy because the quality isn't there. It isn't that much cheaper than the stuff that comes from Taiwan. The Korean stuff isn't bad, better than China, but is hit and miss sometimes. Doing business with China is hard because you really can't return stuff to them. Some of the more advanced companies have "depots" in Hong Kong, but not many yet. Look at Japan 30 years ago, or Taiwan/Korea 10 to 15 years ago, and they were in the same state that China is in now. Today, Japanese product comes at a premium, and is superior to most product (IMHO) that is manufactured here in North America (vehicles immediately spring to mind). Once the Chinese people get their head around the different methodology of doing business in North America, they will come in full force and North America will have some serious issues to deal with.

Globalists would trade with Nazi Germany

[Travoltus]

as long as Germany's Jews made cheap lamp shades for America, free trade apologists would be in favor of letting the Nazi's own all our debt and our jobs.

What with China's political purges (50 million dead there), harvesting of political prisoners (millions dead there) for body parts, the citizens slaughtering their baby girls (200 million dead there), China is in every POSSIBLE way worse than Nazi Germany.

Welcome to the world of globalism and free trade: for America to compete, we need to go back to the days of sweat shops, factories falling apart, workers being chopped to death by faulty machinery, superpollution, and collapsing mines...er, wait a minute...

Oh and before you neo cons say it, no, there isn't a new thing for misplaced workers to retrain for. Biotech is going offshore. Alternative energy is just going to replace traditional energy jobs. We're not going into a new era of explosive job growth - except, oh maybe the tourism, cashier, waiter and janitor industry. Got belhop hat?

No mention of the "Third Shift"

[tlhIngan]

The third shift is slang for when the CM continues to manufacture more of your product without being asked about it. The goal, of course, is to shunt this product to a separate market and undercut your production (after all, they don't have marketing, R&D, etc to pay for). Since these CMs often handle inventory for you, they can order extra parts without you knowing.

Or they take your design, modify it, and manufacture their own (possibly inferior) version. They have everything they need - board layouts (schematic can be derived), binary object code (for FPGAs, flash memory, etc), parts lists, etc.

Just a hazard of outsourced production.