You’ve placed an order and you’re ready to get your customized products manufactured. Now what? What are the next steps in the process?
The Process
After an order is placed and confirmed, E-BI will dedicate a project team to your product. They will hold a kick-off meeting to discuss the timeline and product manufacturing specifications, such as detailed Bill of Materials (BOM) lists,
quality specifications, manufacturing processes, QA measures, and procedure of operations. Depending on the BOM, the manufacturing process may include several tiers of subcontractors. All subcontractors need to be called-up, organized, and brought up to the execution level as quickly as possible in order to minimize ramp up time. With a planned timeline sequence, subcontractors must setup their specific tooling, and dial-in their manufacturing process to make parts without delays.
With orders, documentations, and payment in place at each subcontractor location, we start to build each part for assembly. This work includes raw material orders, labor allocation, ramp up training, equipment setup, customized manufacturing process setup, paperwork, work space, and environment establishment. Of course, all tiers of subcontractors have to follow ISO9001 and other required process such as Rohas, UL, or ISO14001.
After all BOM are made or ordered, quality inspected, and delivered, an assembly plant will integrate them together and perform final testing and packaging. Finally, products will be shipped out to the client’s designated warehouses worldwide.
Conclusion
In practice, E-BI project teams have to constantly fight against limited resources and problems arising from the various tiers of subcontractors. These subcontractors are often juggling multiple manufacturing projects, and are prioritizing based on their own best interests. These problems include production line capacity restrictions, insufficient skilled labor, engineering resource limitations, management issues, material availability, long lead-time, MOQ, quality related rejections, reworks, human errors, cost increases, equipment issues, and all other issues that may affect the product quality and delivery timeline. In the battle of Just-In-Time and Murphy’s Law, we have developed sufficient backup resources at every level to solve any new or reoccurring problems on time, and onsite, before they ‘snowball’ and get out of control. On-time delivery with quality has always been a true test of the resilience and capabilities of a project team. This is especially a challenge when fulfilling occasional or inconsistent orders.