A five-part requirement becomes a 25-part purchase.

How does five parts become 25? OK, here's the story. A project
needs five identical circuit boards, but we're giving them one
spare, so that's six. The effort in designing the PCB was rather
substantial, and the PCB house cost for ordering 10 was the same
as six, so we have 10 blank PCBs. This is good because we might
be able to use this board in another project someday. There are
a number of new surface-mount parts on the board, not in ordinary
inventory, and it's time-consuming to order the parts, which means
you only want to do it once, so certainly we're going to order at
least 10 parts to populate all the PCBs, and maybe a spare part or
two, plus while we're at it, checking orders, labeling inventory
bottles, and etc., we'd like to have a few of these SMT parts for
other projects, so the order quantity becomes 15. But upon placing
the order it's discovered the price break is at 25 parts, and the
price of each of the 10 parts from 15 to 25 is only 1/3 the price
of the first 15 parts, well under 50 cents each, and given the time
spent so far in the process, it makes good sense to get 25 parts.
That's how five parts becomes 25.


--
Thanks,
- Win
.

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