Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: What's Taking So Long?

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What’s keeping you? Why does that quote take so darn long? I hear comments like this all the time from my buyer friends who ask why PCB shops’ quotes take so long. “Why are we kept waiting when we're ready to place an order?” they ask me. “What's wrong with those guys anyway? Don’t they want the business?”

Of course they want the business; they're desperate for your business. But let me ask you something, don’t you want good boards in the end, boards you can use, boards that will work?

For the sake of clarification here the “long time” these folks are talking about can be measured in hours, yes hours, not days. Buyers want their quotes back in an hour or less and if they don’t get them back within that timeframe they get mad.

They're often buying quick-turn boards with lead times of five days or less so they want to get their orders placed as quickly as possible. I get that, but on the same token in this day of high-layer counts, blind and buried vias, special materials, and controlled impedance it's not always possible to turn a quote around in an hour. This is especially true for a quick-turn shop handling literally hundreds of quotes each day. It just doesn’t work that way.

Now there are some companies--online, no-touch companies--that can give you a quote instantly and that’s fine for the kind of business and technology to which this type of quoting applies. And, by the way, once you go down the channel of formulating a no-touch quote if there's any deviation at all (and you talk to a person) you now enter a whole different ball game and will be charged accordingly. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just the way it is.

But if you’re quoting high-tech boards with blind and buried vias and controlled impedance you have to recognize that this is going to take some time.

“Ah, but,” I hear you saying, “some of my vendors provide me with quotes in less than an hour and it's for this type of technology.”

That may be true, but I can tell you this: Those companies are not measuring the impedance, the layer by layer electronic relationship of those layers. That is not happening. It can't be done properly and still get the quote out on time.

Here's what I think is happening: Vendors are rolling the dice when it comes to impedance. They assume you know what you’re talking about and that your calculations are correct so they don't have to worry about them. So, if you get your quote in less than an hour, they are winging it. If you know that and don’t care, good luck.

That being said you must ask yourself if you want boards that represent exactly what your tools are dictating; that what you send is what you will get. This is the way many no-touch companies work. Not that there's anything wrong with that--as long as you know in advance they are not responsible for failures your tooling caused.

This leads me to another complaint that some PCB customer have: “Why does the CAM department keep calling me up with questions? Why don’t they just shut up and build the boards? They have everything they need, don’t they? IMy other vendors don’t do this.”

Look, they do this because they know better and they want to deliver good boards which will be impossible with the data you provided. They're doing this for your own good. After all, isn’t board fabrication the final step of the design process? They are doing you a favor by calling you up to get you to make corrections to your data. That way, by listening to them, by heeding their advice, you will have a solid and accurate data package guaranteed to produce the boards you want.

Many prototype shops take their role very seriously; many don’t even take production orders so they are giving you a completely unbiased view on how your board can be produced in the best manner possible--at the best price. You should be thanking them for that.

Here’s a scary thing: Some buyers have told me that they give their order to the first company to come in with a quote. Think about that for a minute. Pretty scary, isn’t it? Is that really the best company to build your boards? The company that got the quote out first, really? It’s only common sense.