Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1276973
AUGUST 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 15 What do you mean it's our fault? The person said FR-4, so we picked one. Actually, we prob- ably picked not what we thought the design actually wanted, but what the cheapest one was. As we always say, it's always the fabrica- tor's fault. Front-end people know that board shops and front-end engineers are always at fault for everything because they give us the most money and computers and higher-paid people, so we should never make mistakes. That's kind of normal. Another famous one we see all the time is when you get a drawing that says, "ITAR restricted." I'm looking at it in Asia. I'm going, "This says ITAR. We're not supposed to see it." "Well, you're American." No, I can't see this in China. It's supposed to stay in the U.S." We go back to the customer, who says, "That's our commercial division." Well, your note says it's ITAR. We can't quote it. They respond, "It's okay." No, it's not okay. I can't take a verbal waiver for this. People, particu- larly purchasing agents, don't read the notes, number one. They don't necessarily under- stand what it means. I've seen that multiple times. Dack: Usually, board manufacturers will not complain or raise questions until after winning the quote. That makes specification even more important. The less you specify, the more the supplier can agree that they can deliver until the time that they win the quote. That is when we typically see the questions roll out, and it's just a show-stopper. Barry Matties: Do you see that prices tend to be revised at that point as well? Do you ever see an increase? Dack: Yes. This causes a tremendous problem. For instance, in our EMS world, we negotiate with our customers because we have to deliver a quotation for the work also. Our quotation is based on quotations from other suppliers. In the case of a bare board, our job is determin- ing a price, and our costs rely heavily upon the quotations that we receive from our sup- pliers. If we don't get an accurate quote due to lack of specification, then we have to sub- ject the customer to a change in price after we have quoted the work. When prices change, it's never pretty. Korf: I'll kind of agree and disagree with Kelly on one point. I agree that a lot of quotes come in, and you don't do DFM reviews during a quote typically because it takes a lot of work, but at most front-ends in large volume shops, 25–50% or more of their capacity is taken on pre-design DFMs. You get a design that comes in, and prior to quot- ing, the sales folks say, "We need a full DFM." You do a full DFM, all the TQs, stackups, and everything and send it back. It's actually quite a significant portion of the capacity. You would always try to argue, "We shouldn't be doing DFMs for people unless we have a high probability we're going to get the order." I used to actually track that. I used to track DFMs per part number per customer to feed back to sales and say, "I had one cus- tomer one time. We did 11 DFMs for five part numbers and never got an order, and some- body else got a really nice design package to build." Dack: To add insult to injury in this industry, unless the customer has requested the DFM analysis, which good customers do, customers that have a lack of specification don't want to hear about all the problems with their product. Could it be that suppliers are concerned about losing the quote and therefore keep questions close to their chest until winning the quote? Korf: There are two answers to that. At some OEMs, the designers want to know all of the issues, and they get mad if you don't ask all the questions. There are other ones that never want to hear a question. It's part of the psy- chology of front-end engineering. You catego- Dana Korf