When you have a good idea for a new electronic product, setting up a business around it can be a great idea. A lot of successful enterprises started out in much the same way. however, making sure that your manufacturing is efficient is a key part of that, and that may mean you want to find a third-party company who can design and produce your printed circuit boards (or PCB as they are normally known in the electronics industry).

Outsourced Electronic Design

This can be a very beneficial approach and has worked well for a lot of companies who don’t want to bring circuit board design and development in house. But choosing the right company to outsource to is crucial to how successful you can make your business when you delegate the electronic design to a third party.

Location

One of the first things to choose is whether you are happy to work with an offshore company or whether you want your circuit design done by people who are in the same country. There are pros and cons to offshoring when you outsource and there is no real right or wrong answer that fits every business. Offshoring can save on costs and will usually secure you people who are equally skilled on the design side from a technical perspective, but can also lead to communication and time zone related issues that may make your project harder, especially if you are on a tight deadline.

However, cost savings can be significant and if other parts of your project are being done offshore, issues presented through there being time and language differences would be present anyway, so swallowing them for a cost saving in circuit design can be no big deal in some scenarios.

Tools and Processes

The other thing you have to consider as a priority when choosing a provider to outsource the design of your circuit schematics to is whether or not they use the kind of tools and processes that fit your specific project. There are options available like Altium that are generally considered to be the gold standard in PCB design, and these are widely used in the industry and can be found on their downloads page. Knowing something of this and other products and tools used by the businesses in the sector will allow you to make clearer choices about how well suited a provider is to your project.

When evaluating a company you are considering working with, make sure you know a bit about the software used in electronics development and the kind of project methodologies used too, so you can establish whether the business you are looking at offers the exact service you need and uses the best tools for the job – tools which are compatible software wise with your other business areas and their ways of working. Do this, and also choose a supplier whose location works well for your company, and you’ll soon be ready to start a good and productive partnership.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash