Going to low bid contractors is frequently a great idea to either save a bunch of money or sink the company.
Works if you build very standard products--think basic consumer goods which just fall off of the line. Then you can have a bunch of simplistic rules where no tradeoffs are required and you can just shut off your brain. Of course, for those cases, you don't need a real designer anyway--just get a more expensive CAD system which has auto-layout and can follow the simplistic rules.
If your design requires active high level tradeoffs--between producibility, possibilities, digital performance, RF performance, design life, etc, then going low bid will ruin your company. You can't make a clear set of requirements to just "throw over the fence". ANY attempt to do this with a fixed price contract would be asking for a whole bunch of trouble with no one being happy with the outcome.
Good Luck--you certainly need it!
Wayne Thayer
-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Croslin, Robert
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2010 9:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] Contract PCB Design Services T&C
Dear Technetters,
In my company's desire to save costs, the decision was made to lay off
our own PCB designer and contract PCB design services to external design
firms. So far, it's working, but not as well as we had hoped. The
engineering staff realizes that when you dump an amazingly capable
designer willing to work all-nighters and weekends without even being
asked, something is lost, but Sr. Management does not.
1. I'm being asked to provide a set of standard terms and conditions for
such arrangements. Do any of you who use or provide contract PCB design
services have a standard agreement you use?
2. Next, if when using a contract house and you discover they're not the
right ones for that particular design for some reason, and mutually
choose to move it to a more specialized firm, do you simply not pay
anything to the original firm, even though they did build libraries and
do placement and original routing, or do you negotiate a fee for time
spent to date?
I contend that these are services similar to what you receive at a
doctor or dentist who "practice" their arts using learned skills and
that it's simply not an exact science. Am I wrong here?
Bob Croslin
The Nielsen Company
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