Re: [OT] Outsourcing squared

Hello Spehro,


Yes, "easy". But the results may not be so good. With my management
hat on, I consider this an unacceptable reason for a high-volume item.
Suppose the competition has hired someone smart and experienced (like
Joerg) who has managed to make 20 cents worth of parts do the work of
$2 worth in your company's unit. You'll never even know if you don't
ever take a look. For example, in one field I've been involved with a
lot, most serious players make their own ADCs. At the very least (on
high volume products), the design should be pursued along parallel
paths until it is clear from a price/performance pov that one approach
is better than another.


Thanks for the kudos. Sometimes it makes indeed some sense to take a look. However, a good hiring strategy is better.


A lot of the knowledge is not found in textbooks and it's not easily
learned. Some of our competition used to come from a company in the
Chicago area (before they were bought out by a Euro conglomerate). The
design techniques they used in the eighties were still heavily
influenced by internal and supplier organizational knowledge of
techniques used in high-volume consumer products manufacturing. The
old tool and die makers did a lot of amazing things with stamped
metal. (say, I'd like to find a book that's just about PCB
panelization technques. Does one exist?)


That is exactly what many large corporations do not understand. Instead of hiring experienced folks (yes, meaning older) they often try their darndest to shoe them out the door with early retirement incentives. After that, some of their business segments start reeling (look at IBM).

Don't know about any books there. I found it best to talk to guys like my favorite layouter. He is a bit older than I am and that, I found, is a serious advantage.


A couple of weeks ago at a trade show in Asia I approached a company
who was making a "hot" internet-enabled product in an emerging
market. They had a really low price and they were obviously not (just)
low-balling. A few questions with one of their tech people and I
discovered that their SOC design was using an embedded 8051 core
rather than something like an ARM which most others feel is necessary.
Even dismantling it wouldn't have likely worked in that case.


Same thing there. They probably had some seasoned people who knew how to drag race an 8051, win and leave the others miffed.

My 8051 designs are, for some reasons, the longest runners in production.


Another case- a company making an inexpensive premium (in the advert
sense) product redesigns a competitor's product to replace a metal
part with plastic (investing in molds) and begins to have the
competitor for lunch. Cutthroat market. They are very proud of their
"optimization". A year or so later, the tide turns against them-- on
examination, the plastic part with its expensive tooling in their
design has been replaced by a coated cardboard die-cut part. That's
evolution in action. And how do we evaluate the performance of the
engineer(s) who were paid well to look directly at the problem and
could not see the best solution?


They should have hired some engineers from the consumer industry, the guys that design disposable stuff. They would have known. I did a lot of outside-our-turf hiring and never regretted it, ever.

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.

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