Production

Moving a product into production is a feat of communication. It’s about spending the potential energy you have been developing throughout the earlier processes, optimizing imperfect situations, and taking a couple of prototypes held together with duct tape and finding a way to mass produce them.

Historically you would now found a corporation, borrow some money, build a factory, hire a few hundred people and start churning out radios or TVs. But these days due to supply chains, low-cost labour and specialization you’re going to contract out most of the functions that go into mass producing your device. In order, you are going to contract out the following services:

# Component Supply # Mechanical Enclosure Manufacturing # PCB Manufacturing # PCA Assembly # Product Assembly # Final Testing

The goal should be to provide your customer with the highest quality product for the lowest cost and at highest margins you can, with some obvious optimization of those variables. In many cases the best case mass-manufacturing systems have outsourced all 6 functions, though you can probably be successful and only outsource the first 4.

There are three major stages to the production phase (Export For Manufacturing, Mass Manufacturing & Southeast Asia, and DFM, DFT & BOM Cost Optimization).