-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- pcb007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueTechnology Roadmaps
In this issue of PCB007 Magazine, we discuss technology roadmaps and what they mean for our businesses, providing context to the all-important question: What is my company’s technology roadmap?
Wet Process Control
In this issue, we examine wet processes and how to obtain a better degree of control that allows usable data to guide our decisions and produce consistently higher-quality products.
Don’t Just Survive, Thrive
If we are to be relevant and prosper during these next critical decades in electronics, we must do more than survive. As an industry, we can and must thrive. In this issue, our contributors explore these concepts meant to help you take your business to the next level.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - pcb007 Magazine
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
CAM Engineering—Reducing Costs
While having on-demand capacity, improved automation, and fast turn-around are critical to any front-end engineering operation, achieving those goals with a cost-effective solution is imperative. Electronics are constantly under cost-reduction pressures. Functionality, capability, and complexity increase while costs decrease. Moore’s law is still alive and well and will probably remain accurate into the foreseeable future. He predicted the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double every 18 months. This has since been revised to doubling every two years. Still, as general electronics become increasingly complex, the cost continues to reduce and the downward pressure is felt through the entire supply chain. PCB manufacturers are no exception.
As I speak with many customers in the United States and Europe, access to highly skilled engineers is becoming more and more scarce. Younger people are attracted to jobs at high-profile, high-tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. Let’s face it—the PCB industry isn’t “sexy” to younger people and the current generation of engineers is slowly entering retirement age. More and more PCB companies are losing engineering talent through attrition. This problem is hampering growth of many U.S. and European companies.
Outsourcing with the right partner will not only offset the difficulty of finding talented CAM engineers, but can also help find these resources at lower costs. Countries like India offer an abundance of highly skilled engineering talent at a very reasonable cost structure. Thanks to the British legacy, English is widely spoken, especially in the engineering community, making India a unique destination for CAM outsourcing. In my experience, in addition to lower wages, the workforce is highly dedicated and loyal. It’s not uncommon for people to start and end a career at the same company, providing tremendous benefits, like continuity and loyalty, for end customers.
With the right partner, you will gain the ability to manage costs and retain a sustainable and reliable workforce while not having to compromise quality, delivery, or capability.
In summary, using an outsourcing partner can help solve your cost reduction challenges by allowing you to:
- Add highly skilled engineers at a lower cost
- Remove the burden of having to find experienced engineers on your premises
- Retain high-quality, quick turn-around and experienced staff while managing costs
- Capture more market share from your competitors with your unique competitive advantage of being more cost effective
- Free up critical engineering resources to help generate more sales and interact with customers on technical sales
- Grow your business and have scalable font-end engineering resources to fulfill your changing requirements
More Columns from The Big Picture
The Big Picture: The Shift From China to Southeast AsiaThe Big Picture: Quality Front-end Engineering as a Core Differentiator
The Big Picture: What Two Hot Wars Could Mean for the Electronics Supply Chain
The Big Picture: Essential Engineering—The Intersection of Humans and Machines
The Big Picture: How Values Drive Company Culture and Create Trust
The Big Picture: A New Globalization
The Big Picture: The Virtual Via Drum
The Big Picture: Robust Cybersecurity System Means Greater Investment Opportunity