how to choose a good PCB supplier?

how to choose a good PCB supplier?

In the eyes of outsiders, procurement belongs to Party A and is a strong party in choosing suppliers. If the PCB supplier has high price and poor service, it can be replaced at any time. But in fact, the procurement work is not so easy. Screening out a stable and high-quality PCB supplier often faces pain points such as price, delivery time, and quality.

So how to solve these pain points in procurement, is there any way to easily get PCB procurement?

The answer is yes. The mature procurement of major manufacturers follows a standard process, so that the procurement work is standardized and the work is easy to be recognized. This is a set of procurement process methods summed up by Sunking Board after communicating with many buyers of major manufacturers. I will share it with you and hope it will be helpful to you.

Going directly to the topic, a complete supplier selection process should include product demand positioning, creation of supplier pools, supplier analysis, and confirmation of cooperative suppliers.

1. Product demand positioning First of all, you must analyze your own product demand positioning, and you must be clear about these details. Sheet material, process requirements, purchase quantity evaluation, brand or quality requirements, supplier geographical requirements, supplier size requirements, material delivery time. First, look at what type of PCB the product needs, and secondly look at the difficulty of your PCB process, and find the corresponding process capability. Then look at your production volume. If the monthly order volume is several hundred pieces, then it is a small batch for the PCB factory. In this way, you can find a matching factory. Different factories have different positioning. If you find the right one, you can cooperate more smoothly. For example, if your company has a lot of research and development, and the volume is small and medium, you can find fast proofing, moderate price, and small MOQ. If your company produces fast-moving products in bulk, and the delivery time is relatively urgent, you should look for fast delivery and stable quality. If your company produces high-end boards and high-precision boards, you should look for industry leaders.

2. Create a supplier pool

With the product requirements clear, the next step is to create a supplier pool. Looking for suppliers is not just for the lack of supplier resources. If some companies already have supplier resources, they should also optimize the existing supplier resource structure.

3. Supplier analysis After preliminary screening of satisfactory suppliers, a round of in-depth screening will be carried out. In this process, it can be judged from the following dimensions: supplier's product capacity (manufacturing capacity), supplier's capacity, production quality management, supplier's supply chain management ability, and supplier's anti-risk ability. In the first step of demand analysis, we talked about the process requirements, to find the factory with the process capacity matching the process requirements. Then judge the factory's capacity and management ability, because it involves delivery and quality assurance. Finally, analyze the strength background of suppliers and their ability to resist risks. To put it bluntly, well-capitalized factories are more resilient to risk. In the past two years, many small and medium-sized PCB factories have closed down, which has actually increased the production risk of the purchaser.

4. Supplier decision Making Once you've done all the work above, it's pretty much easy to decide who your target supplier is. In addition, it is recommended to retain 2 to 3 high-quality and reliable suppliers to build a healthy and stable supplier pool. Of course, in addition to the above steps, you can also audit the factory on site, you can pay more attention to the equipment, 6S, production site, etc., go into the factory to further understand the strength of the factory. PCB plays a vital role in the performance and life of electronic products. The downstream customers of PCB products have high requirements for PCB quality, and generally adopt the "qualified supplier certification system", which has a long inspection period. Once a long-term and stable cooperative relationship is formed, they will not easily change suppliers. Therefore, if you put more effort into the initial stage, the follow-up cooperation will also reduce a lot of trouble.