Electronics manufacturing uses the most high technology processes known to man.  Automated furnaces and evaporators create wafers with processes that may take minutes, or months.  Chips and boards are etched with increasingly more dense designs.  Chips are packaged by specialized lines with extreme tolerances.  Boards are automatically populated by pick and place machines.  The opportunities for defects can be very large.

You face serious overseas competition and industrial espionage.  You may find that customers have counterfeit versions of your products interspersed with real product; and may even find yourself supporting these counterfeits with warranty support! The only way you can effectively compete with cheap offshore product is to reduce your costs, while increasing your quality and your customer’s perceptions of your quality.

 

Virtually every country you ship to has its own testing agency (UL, CSA, etc.) and you must comply with those regulations as well as the domestic ones.  If you are shipping product to China you have to determine your strategy to deal with China RoHS. 

 

Most of your people are specialists – they know their piece of the puzzle very well – but it is a large puzzle, and a great deal of team work is required to keep things running.  You need to focus on process improvement – with the level of automation you employ, it is easy to lose sight.

It is not unusual for product designs to be continually improved, and management of these engineering changes can be a major task in and of itself.  Sometimes a product starts life as a “version 2” and becomes a “V 5” before it exits the process.  You need to look at yields throughout your process – a high final inspection yield does not necessarily mean that your efficiency is good.

From optical chips to processor packaging; from circuit boards to radar detectors; from communication switches to cell phones, from carbon batteries to leading edge cells; QIC has been involved with electronics manufacturers for decades.