Outsourced Out of a Future?

Alert! Self-serving Content Ahead!

I suppose I’m supposed to be self-serving now and then. I mean, I don’t personally design and build things for a living. I do that for fun and dim hopes of robot world domination. These days, I tell people about things for a living so that makes it my job to be mostly self-serving (“self” being defined as “my company”). But self-serving isn’t always bad. I couldn’t get gas for my car here in Oregon without being self-serving. I could get hamburgers though, so I’ll have to conclude that it’s a 50-50 proposition.

We understand outsourcing here at Screaming Circuits. That’s what we do — take people’s outsourced prototype and short-run production assembly work. Being located in Canby, Oregon, USA, we see both sides of the outsourcing discussion. As I said, on the one hand, we do assembly for other people. On the other hand, being a North American manufacturing company, we’ve seen a lot of work go offshore.

Not that I’m against things not in the US. I firmly believe that most of this country’s success is due to the fact that we’re from here, there and all over the world. But, I do want to have a job and I want my friends and family to have a job. We have to be worth something in this country and the rampant pace of off-shoring sometimes makes me wonder if we’re just deluding ourselves in that regard.

The prompt for this post is this article in the Los Angeles Times about Boeing’s outsourcing in the 787 Dreamliner program. The quick summary of the article is to speculate that Boeing went way too far in their outsourcing and have put at risk not only the financial success of the program, but also the company’s future engineering prowess.

Now, here’s the self-serving part. The article outlines how they went wrong by over-outsourcing, but it also points to the value of specialty companies like Screaming Circuits:

That’s not to say that outsourcing never makes sense — it’s a good way to make use of the precision skills of specialty manufacturers, which would be costly to duplicate.

That’s us. We specialize in prototypes and small volumes. We specialize in new and difficult component package sizes. We see such a variety of different types of designs here in our shop that we get good at things like QFNs and micro BGAs sooner than anyone else. (Hyperbole, perhaps, but I do believe it none the less). We’ve built things that go under water, up into space and everywhere in between. We don’t specialize in one or a few specific vertical markets, like medical or consumer, we specialize in the prototype phase of the development program across virtually all market categories.

So, outsourcing: I’m in favor of intelligent outsourcing. My advice to you: Outsource where it make sense. Don’t outsource where it doesn’t. Look at the true cost of such decisions, not just the surface image. Keep some value add in your company and don’t just become a marketing shell.

Duane Benson
Time to make my oatmeal.
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