This article was initially published on Medium as part of my job at Supplyframe running the Supplyframe Hardware group.

You now have fewer teammates (or none at all), but you can still build a product. What has changed?

Is your engineering team getting bigger?

I’m willing to bet no. In fact, I’m guessing some of you reading this don’t even have a “team” anymore. Maybe you’re at a startup and you’re the only hardware engineer on staff. Or maybe you’re at a small company and you have other hardware folks, but none that cover the same areas as you do. You have no one to talk to, no one to collaborate with.

What now?

The lower limit

The shrinking number of employees has a lower quantum limit; you can’t have fewer than one engineer in a company. More specifically, you can’t have fewer than one employee. In that case…well, the engineer IS the company.

The lone engineer isn’t new

I can hear the skeptics in the audience:

• “I’ve never had any help! What is new about that?”
• “My friend Bill is a consultant and regularly creates full ‘products’ for his clients!”
• “What if you’re hiring people as 1099 employees? Are you still a solo?”
  So what is different?

The big difference is I’m talking about products. This is no longer just building a prototype, which I agree has been possible for a long time. This is a fully formed company, with significant possible cashflow, all without any (full time) employees.

When the world was vertical

“Back in the day” a large in-house team was the way things got built. Truly vertically integrated companies like Bell Labs (and really their manufacturing operation Western Electric) wouldn’t go purchase desks from some 3rd party service. They would send word down to the woodshop and have a desk built custom for a new employee. They would have in house resources build…well everything. This lead to employee rolls that were in the 10s of thousands. These days, we purchase equipment from McMaster or Amazon and have it in our shops the same afternoon. The apparatus and convenience of industry has superseded the need to expand the payroll of a company.

Some might lament the reduction in innovation that comes from not having on-site integrated machine shops and production facilities. I have lamented such things in the past because of the pace of iteration. But that is hardly even true these days. Though Sal might be an expert craftsman in the woodshop creating your desk, he has a finite amount of time. If you favor fast turn around and parallel development, on-demand services enable a solo engineer to get a lot done by him or herself. If you need it fast? Simply pay a higher premium to the parts you need fastest. Let’s take a look at some of the offerings in the manufacturing world these days.

Outsourcing

The services for prototyping and even low scale production have really ramped in the past years. The hands-off nature of it all has been impressive at how it enables creation of nearly fully formed products.

• Electrical Assembly — Macrofab (I also talked to them as part of a DfM Case Study series), CircuitHub, PCB.ng
• Machining — Plethora, Fictiv
• 3D printing — Shapeways, 3Dhubs
• Mold making — Proto Labs, Xcentric Molds
• Laser, waterjet cutting — Ponoko, Sculpteo, Big Blue Saw
• Box creation — Packlane, ZoxxBoxx, BuildABox
• Printing, Merchandise, Branded objects — …too many to list

This is not an exhaustive list, of course. And each day a new “startup” puts a web front end onto existing service businesses, which increases availability of these manufacturing services (though true automation relates more to the workflow rather than the UI).

As automation and outsourcing capabilities continues to increase, it’s not just that you can get others to create pieces of your product; you can set these services off on a task without talking to a human.
This seems like a change that impacts convenience more than company reach. But it really has implications for the required size of a team.

Collaboration and Sourcing Tools

More engineers can operate independently of a large overhead operation. Even within Supplyframe, we see many of our products supporting these engineers:

• Hackaday.io enables engineers to chat about and document projects that pique their interest.
• Tindie allows them to sell a few of these products as a test for their target market.
• FindChips and FindChips Pro helps price out the early BOM when they decide go to production.
• Supplyfx allows them to find potential vendors and Contract Manufacturers (CMs) when preparing to scale up to outside facilities.
• Quotefx and Polydyne create software for the CMs that serve many of these smaller creators.

And of course, the Supplyframe Hardware blog speaks to their daily plights and documents others struggle

Money

Of course having the accessibility of the catalog distributors and a range of hands-off services doesn’t matter much if you can’t pay your bills.

Crowdfunding

Yes, this is the point in the article where I mention crowdfunding (you saw it coming). But I will stop short of calling it a solution, because it involves taking on tasks that you wouldn’t have otherwise. For instance, you might need to order more promotional merchandise than you would if you were not running a crowdfunding campaign. Even though this is an automate-able task…it’s another task.

Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping is using money from previous sales of items to fund the next build of items (which then generates more cash). This is an increasingly likely option as the automated services trends towards smaller and smaller builds. If you are able to order 10 finished parts or assemblies, that requires much less overall capital than ordering 100 or 1000, as is sometimes required when working with larger Contract Manufacturers. As long as the higher per-piece cost is factored into your COGS and subsequent MSRP, you will be able to cover your costs of funding your next round of building things.

Venture
Another interesting trend is the increasing availability of angel and venture funding for small projects. Alternative funding structures from outfits like Indie.vc focus on smaller companies with less growth potential, but also with interesting niches. This means that a solo engineer could get some money to build initial units and still keep outside investment low, maintaining control. The engineer could remain a “solo”, because the lower expectation of growth means hiring employees is not a foregone conclusion.

Solos are a part of the mix
The point I wanted to make here is not that every engineer will become a solo engineer. Instead, I think it’s interesting that it’s possible to be a solo engineer and push a product out into the world without a large staff of people. Yes, you will have help from outsiders and possibly even part-time contractors, but the overall structure of your “team” will remain quite low.

I would love to hear from people who are in this situation. Please leave a comment below or email me!

This article was initially published on Medium as part of my job at Supplyframe running the Supplyframe Hardware group.

Think about people you graduated high school or college with. I bet they went off and became doctors, lawyers, marketers, salespeople and a range of other things, right? Some even be entrepreneurs, starting something brand new. Now answer this question:

How many of them started factories?
I am willing to bet more of them started food trucks.

There’s a lot of focus on hardware these days. Yes, it’s true that it’s easier than ever to get hardware designed and manufactured. No, it’s not true that it’s “easy” now.

I want to put a line in the sand and state something unequivocally: manufacturing is neither easy nor glamorous. No amount of flowery blog posts or meet-ups with high profile speakers will change that. And I love both. The truth is that it’s a grind getting your project out the door.

The people

Line in the sand notwithstanding, the people doing manufacturing make it all worth it. Why? They’re superheroes! If you meet a successful engineer who regularly deals with manufacturing, it means you know someone who:

• Gets things done under pressure
• Has attention to detail
• Is dedicated to their work

So go ahead and hire a person who has successfully manufactured products…but don’t put the institution on a pedestal.

Why is manufacturing still hard?

Hardware manufacturing is difficult is because of the interdependence of so many pieces.

Imagine a product that has a mechanical enclosure and one PCB mounted inside it (my go-to example). If one component is not available or working properly, it puts the entire device at risk. Not only that, you don’t control the entire process. Especially with electronics, you can’t walk down to the machine shop and re-do a part to fix the tolerance. No, you’re buying all your parts from external sources, each of them with their own internal design constraints and tolerances.

In the case where you are working on a mechanical piece and think you could just go and modify the part or create a new one, well…not quite. You need to have the material on hand to allow for that sort of thing. Even blocks of aluminum take time to order. Margins on machining aren’t particularly high either, so there’s little incentive to keep large amounts of stock on hand. And finally, assuming you have the means to create a modified part that instead goes into your assembly, you still need to do that over and over. What’s more, you need to track which units have the modified process as part of their assembly and track it for customer support and any issues that come up.

Though I’ve proposed an idea like Continuous Integration for manufacturing in the past, the tracking of those integrations can be almost as cumbersome as the change itself.

The pretense of glamour

There are no particular articles extolling the glamour of manufacturing that I’d like to refute. It just seems to be a trend that I see. As more and more is written about manufacturing (especially about the importance of it to the US economy), people I talk to seem to idolize the process.

Over time, I find myself looking back on my own time with rosy colored glasses. The benefits of being close to a manufacturing floor cannot be understated in terms of process and design innovation, but that is the subject of another article. For now, I want to catalog my past observations as a reference for myself and others.

Factories are dirty

Making things creates waste and dust and scrap. It’s impossible to have a 100% efficient use of materials. As such, there are waste products that ends up cluttering up the manufacturing floor or creating by products like dust and grime. There are extreme examples, of course. Looking at pictures of manufacturing in rural parts of Asia evokes feelings of concern for the workers and the quality of the products. But even in clean 1st world facilities, it’s not quite the cleanliness level as working in an office. It’s hard to describe, but even when I was working in a class 10,000 clean room, something feels different about it. So while “dirty” might not describe something that by definition has no more than 10,000 particles per unit area, it is a long way from the bean bags and massage chairs of the high end software development environment.

It’s still very dependent upon people

People are great, right? They catch mistakes and have an eye on the process so that when something is awry, they note it and give the engineers feedback. Talking to assembly workers used to be a great way to understand how to optimize a process for more efficient assembly in the future. Talking to a calibration technician helped to understand which steps failed and took the longest.

The other thing about people is, they’re not so great. They are superstitious (“when I plug it in like this, it works…but not when I do this other thing”). They are stubborn (“I think we did it better before”). In short, they are human. Dealing with their every day problems is a reality and there is much an HR aspect to working with them as there is the practical “how to build this thing and get it out the door” aspect. Lack of repeatability in the process (likely with any humans “in the loop”) also can lead to lower quality products or higher customer returns due to mistakes.

The hours

When your factory floor 1st shift reaches capacity, you have two choices: stop making product or add more shifts. Most companies decide upon the latter, assuming they can recoup their costs from adding more people at different parts of the day/night. After all, if they are making money by running the first shift, it follows that they can continue doing that at night, possibly even with higher output due to fewer interruptions.

The downside is that people working with manufacturing have to flow with the lack of boundaries this schedule carries. Emergency on the factory floor at 2 am? You’re going to get called. Used to coming in at a leisurely 9:30 am start time? Not when you have a shift change meeting to attend at 7 am. The hours are long and if you’re on salary, you’re viewed as someone who is “free” (they don’t pay anything more for you to be there at the 7 am and the 7 pm meeting, for better or worse).

There is no red carpet at the end

Sure, some products have launch parties. Especially large consumer products with a bright future. But you don’t ever see manufacturing people on the carpet, do you? It’s because they’re still in the factory, cranking out product.

In manufacturing, there is no end. There is the next product that needs to start as soon as the last one is done.

What about the robots?

When I started talking about dirty factory floors, filled with manual labor, you were preparing your argument about how robots are the future, right? I’d agree with you if you weren’t 30+ years behind. Industrial robots have been here since the 70s. You can go to a scrapyard and pick up an aged industrial robot or assembly line.

The trend of increasing robots on the factory floor will continue, but won’t change the glamour of the profession.

First off, a lot of the line will not be capable of replacing with a robot, at least not in the way that people envision it. Robots require a highly optimized process, which also means high volume to justify the costs. While there are lots of downsides to humans, their adaptability is another of their positive traits. Yes, you can get a Baxter robot, which is meant to do learn the “everything else” on a manufacturing floor. But those have many years until adoption.

The pick and place machine is another relevant robot that has been on the floor for many years. This machine has allowed countless electronics assemblies to be manufactured at high speeds. However, ask an operator of a pick and place machine to see just how “automated” it is. Once you have set up the machine, it can (in theory) run unfettered. But the reality is that it’s another piece of automation that generally speeds up the process but is far from automated. More on this below.

While a “lights out” factory is the holy grail of factory automation, those lights are off for a reason: because making of things still isn’t glamorous. It’s just something that has to get done.

Sourcing

The material aspects of manufacturing cannot be ignored. The most automated factory in the world will fall to its knees without a well-developed supply chain. Making hardware requires material input, be it raw materials (chemicals, metal stock) or sub assemblies and components (resistors, power modules, bluetooth modules).

As stated at the beginning, each additional component of an assembly represents another potential failure point. Risk is everywhere.

While the cost of failure is high, there are often thin margins in manufacturing, representing a need to seek cost reductions in any way possible. Each change from the originally specified part might be justified in terms of reducing cost, but that introduces another possible point of error. If a purchasing agent finds a good deal on a part and subsequently substitutes a 5% resistor when a 1% was needed, the product implications could be dire. The need for communication is crucial between all levels of an organization, from manufacturing floor, through purchasing, to the original design engineer.

You know what’s not a glamorous job? Approving 37 requests for swapping out resistors via email on a Monday morning.

It’s a grind, but that’s why it’s important

The negativity of this post is not to say that we shouldn’t strive for a pristine, automated and efficient factory floor. That really is the end goal for every factory. This post is meant to act as a foil against articles, here and otherwise, that talk about the grand future of manufacturing. It’s a difficult job and that’s why you don’t hear about your college friends racing to start another factory. That’s why it’s important to continue improving processes. There is opportunity and monetary gains for those who figure out how to make the entire process better.

This article was initially published on Medium as part of my job at Supplyframe running the Supplyframe Hardware group.

“Perfect” is not an absolute requirement. But every step away from perfection moves you closer towards failing to deliver a working product on time.

I recently made a foray back into the manufacturing world for the Hackaday Superconference badge. I was not the hardware designer, I was simply helping coordinate the manufacturing of a product. And only 300 pieces at that. In reality, I was playing the role of purchasing agent for a small run of manufacturing.

This task involved evaluating a range of possible Contract Manufacturers (CMs), finding all the required parts and finally coordinating orders to get them delivered to the CM. Past getting the Bill of Materials (BoM) in order, we had to worry about the programming, testing, and final assembly of the badges. There were many opportunities for failure, especially among 300 individual boards.

Below I will describe a few of the problems we encountered on this journey and how we dealt with them. I will also discuss the ways we communicated throughout the process, as that introduced even more friction into an already hectic manufacturing process; this is a common problem throughout the manufacturing world and we will attempt to discuss and solve these issues in future articles.

Reality Problems

Iteration

In a normal manufacturing environment, there would be prototypes and pilot builds and first articles and many other more rigid, process-based tasks. As we were going straight from a few hand assembled prototypes to 300 required units, the ability to tweak the process was much reduced. Whereas we might have had some leeway for “not so perfect” on the first run in a different scenario, it instead meant that we had to repair or scrap any boards that didn’t work.

Past History

Another way to refine a manufacturing process is to not only iterate on manufacturing methods as you move towards higher volume production, but also taking advantage of past products and processes. Manufacturing is really meant for high volume product creation, as the “overhead” costs are amortized over a longer time period (spread out over 1000s instead of 10s of products being made). One way to make up for not having volume is to utilize the knowledge of past builds, even if the costs for setting up a new low volume product will be higher. Our issue was that we had not sent a board out for production in the US (a previous badge had been made in Serbia for the Hackaday Belgrade conference back in April). As such, we were essentially starting the manufacturing process from scratch.

Parts available in distribution

The badge was designed by Voja Antonic, who is based out of Belgrade, Serbia. Another interesting (and slightly problematic) situation was that the parts used to design the prototype were from a particular distributor in the Balkans (Comet is a distributor in Serbia and Bulgaria). These parts were from a range of manufacturers, but the stocking distributors were different than the available parts in the US. The meant certain types of components were essentially unavailable, as we understood it.

That’s not to say all parts were from Comet; the majority of components were sourced from Digikey, actually. But the same problems exist with any centralized distribution mechanism: the amount of stock in any given location at any given time is a possible show-stopper, especially as you move up in quantities (128 LEDs per board x 300 boards = 38,400 LEDs — before accounting for ‘wastage’). Since we were attempting to source all components from distribution — instead of placing an order for longer lead time parts from the factory — we were at the mercy of available stock. The inability to source a sufficient quantity of components from distribution means that there would not be enough components to complete the build.

Yes, Supplyframe makes many of the best online tools that track distributor stock. But those numbers can rapidly change from day to day. For example, we bought 40,000 LEDs in one fell swoop, clearing out the inventory of that part (in distribution, throughout the world) for the following few days! Without a secured source of components (and no component is ‘secured’ until it hits your loading dock), you are at the mercy of whether other strangers are planning to use the same parts as you.

Non-swappability

Another way to get around sourcing issues is to simply redesign a board or to find functional equivalents. For a product like this badge, whose form was largely based around the component types, this was not possible. If it was a product with an external case, the components would be obfuscated by plastic or another type of enclosure. However, for this product the raw view of the components was one of the best parts! The large scale of the red push buttons was critical to the look and feel of this product.

Another non-mechanical example of non-swappability was the LEDs. The chosen LEDs were a particular brightness that was tied to the capacity of the AAA batteries. Yes, we could have sourced other LEDs, but the cost in terms of batteries would increase, in addition to affecting the user experience.

Dealing with reality

Almost all problems in manufacturing can be solved with time or money.

Some of the above problems really required us to build more time into the project; with that extra time we could either redesign in a creative manner or we could sourcing components directly from the manufacturer (and factor in the 8+ week lead time of components).

Since we were not able to extend the “time” aspect of the project, we instead opted for money. This usually translates to ordering things on rush (PCBs, faster shipping speeds from distributors). In our case, the solution was simple: if the parts you need are only available from overseas, order them from wherever they are available. This may seem obvious, but there was a concern about the parts getting stuck in customs or being allowed to ship at all to the states. A phone call or two later, we realized this distributor was like many others: well versed at shipping parts all over the world. After all, if a customer really needs a part to complete a build, they are likely to pay a large premium to get that part in-hand. Sure, there was a higher shipping cost than normal, but this was small compared to the cost of needing to respin the board or find alternate components.

Reducing Risk

One other way that we reduced risk was our CM (Small Batch Assembly) did a test run of 2 panels (5 boards per panel) and sent them to us for testing before taking on the remaining boards. While this slowed down the process (because we needed to do a full suite of in-circuit testing before moving on to manufacturing), this approximated a single cycle of manufacturing before pulling the trigger. Otherwise we could have created 290 boards that didn’t work at all.

Our communication (and how to improve it)

One thing that surprised me about getting back into the manufacturing side of things is the inefficiency of communication. These were the same struggles I had when manufacturing products as a design engineer at a large organization. The overhead for talking about how a product will be manufactured, especially when finding and starting up with a new CM can involve a lot of churn. Internal communication about the process also can be tough to track, as multiple stakeholders need to understand the status of products as they move towards manufacturing. As such, I will outline some of our methods and how we might move towards fixing them in the near future.

Email

For this small, seemingly simple process, I had a couple of 20+ email chains with multiple people adding to each. In an attempt to keep everyone notified, more opinions are added along the way. To be fair, sometimes these added participants reminded us of a possible pitfall or a required task. But as a general rule, more people means a longer decision making process.

In a perfect world, communication about a certain piece of the assembly process would only be visible to those making decisions about that piece of the assembly. The group for testing the board might be different people and the communication should then be limited to only that group. It would also be useful to have some kind of summary, in case a member outside those groups needs to get an overview for high level discussions (and decision making).

Spreadsheets

This is the basic tool of sourcing agents and engineers alike. The spreadsheet provides a logical and rigorous way of tracking costs; this is especially true for things like Bills of Material, where the costs are multiplicative and a change in particular quantities needs to propagate throughout the sheet to update final costs. However, most spreadsheets are not only used for cost estimates and BOMs; they also get re-purposed as schedule trackers, to-do lists and more.

In a perfect world, there would be tools available to track to-do lists and what needs to be done, outside of the window of spreadsheets. Tracking costs is already possible (and enhanced) with tools like FindChips Pro, because it not only rolls up costs but looks up cost of components dynamically; however, the best case scenario would be continually tying into the pricing APIs and tracking costs over time. Also continually checking the status of stock if we are relying on distribution and tracking the progress of part shipments if we are waiting on longer lead time parts from manufacturers.

Chat

Internally, we use Supplyfx chat to keep track of the status of the project. While we are well acclimated to this method of communication (including using group chats to track particular pieces of the process), it still can be tough to understand the status of individual pieces required to get the product out the door:

• Have all of the critical components been secured?
• Have we checked on quantities available in distribution (especially as the number of total units we wanted shifted)
• Has the testing plan been formulated?
• Are any mechanical pieces being integrated and have those been sourced (in the case of the badge, a lanyard and a laser cut bevel were required)

In a perfect world, we would be able to break each of these conversations out to sub chats, with each stakeholder included. We would also be able to update the official stance on each issue with a top line status, which could then be reported on a daily basis (“Test plan still being formulated, last updated 11/30/16”). Stagnant items would be flagged, especially if there was a due date attached to them.

Lessons Learned

The “startup costs” and mental overhead required for manufacturing is not to be taken lightly. The purchasing agents, engineers and manufacturing professionals who are cranking through products on a daily basis will be the best suited to optimizing and refining their process. Supplyframe already makes a bunch of tools for this group, and many of them are used to manufacture products all over the world (Quotefx, PolyDyne, FindChips). We have learned throughout this process that there is an opportunity for tools that target not just the high volume, high speed manufacturing (where tools are required) but also for people working as a solo engineer/designer or working with a small team. We will be talking more about that soon, especially with regards to Supplyfx, another tool from Supplyframe.

We want your opinion

We are interested in talking to others who are somewhere between prototyping and high volume manufacturing in their product development. As mentioned above, developing tools to get towards the “perfect world” is already in motion. However, we understand we have limited experience. We want to continue refining and defining tools that will help you build a reliable, profitable product. Get in touch with me if you’d like to add your voice and get early access to new tools.