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It’s Only Common Sense: Get the Most From Your PCB Vendors

We have talked a lot in this column about how board shops should treat their customers, and how they should try to get to know their customers and their needs. So now, let’s switch things around and talk about how customers should treat board shops, how they should work with board shops to get the best product and the best performances out of them.

For years now, we have been talking about the new way of doing business.  We have discussed issues such as the “gray market” in which companies buy their PCBs online without ever having to talk to anyone. (By the way, I consider this to be the ultimate step in the commoditizing of the printed circuit board as a product.)

The trend in the electronics market has been to trivialize the PCB to the point where the technology is considered pedestrian, repeatable and in some cases not even worthy of its own ITAR protection. Now, companies can buy boards off websites with a computer and a credit card without ever having to talk to anyone.

The salespeople I work with find themselves overwhelmed with frustration, caught between a rock and a hard place, with their management (yours truly included) whipping them to get out there and visit with those customers. Meet with them face-to-face. Meanwhile, those wily customers will do everything they can to make sure that doesn’t ever happen, putting up all kinds of barriers to keep those pesky salespeople from seeing them in person. And that’s just the buyer; forget ever seeing anyone from the rest of the project team.

In short, the relationship between the board shops and their customers is now virtually (no pun intended) non-existent. And that spells trouble. Big trouble. All business is about people: people talking to each other, people understanding each other, and, yes, people caring about each other. And now that has been lost. People are not talking to each other…ever.

So where does that leave us? We now have the biggest gap ever between the people who design and engineer the end-product and the people who build the board that goes into that product. Now, the people building the board have almost nothing go on. They are operating in a vacuum.

In the old days before the Internet, these people used to talk to each another. The customer’s project team would visit the board house or vice versa or both, and then they would discuss the project. The customer would talk about the project in detail with her vendor. He would explain what they were doing, and she would explain why the boards needed to be the way they needed to be and make sure that the people building the board understood why the board needed to be that way. In these meetings the board guys would get a good understanding of what their boards were going into and why certain parameters were extremely critical. They would be exposed to the whole picture to the point where the customer’s callouts would make sense to them. And often around that meeting table, ideas would be exchanged. The board guys could come up with suggestions for making the board a more effective component of the end-product, more easily manufacturable, and, surprisingly often, less expensive.

And through this process, something else would happen. The teams, the customers and the fabricators would bond, they would start becoming one team, real partners to the point that they were all working on the same project with the same goal in mind: the success of that project. They would become brothers and sisters in arms working for one common goal. This, of course, caused them to be open and honest with each other. People from both sides of the relationship would get to know each other.

The company-to-company relationship far would far exceed the buyer-to-salesperson-only relationship (if you want to call it that) that we have today. The teams would get to know each other, from engineers to quality people to program managers, and they would work on the project together. If the boards were particularly difficult and the shop was having a hard time building them, their customer would send their team in and they would work side-by-side solving the problems and successfully producing good boards as a team.

The irony is that our end-products are more sophisticated. The PCBs that go into those products are more complicated than ever but now we have no partnerships. People in both companies seldom if ever talk to each other, never mind actually meet. This has got to change.

We have to go back to those pre-Internet days where people meet, discuss, come up with common solutions and goals, and get to know and trust each other while working together building the products of tomorrow. As an old PCB guy, I am looking right at you, our customers, and saying, “Dear customers, we can’t do it without you. Come visit us. Let us visit you. Get to know us. Come on, let’s work together on making your products better than they have ever been.”

Stay tuned. Next week we’ll talk about the specific steps we have to take to develop those partnerships. These steps will make both of us better. Together, we’re better than we can ever hope to be apart. So, check in with me next week and we’ll go there—together. It’s only common sense.