[Elecraft] ARRL Reports Ducie Operator's K3 Comments

[Brett Howard]

I work in a company that does a lot of overseas work and if quality is
important you end up in places like Singapore and Malaysia.  Then you also
end up paying a lot more for labor.  Average wage for employees in our
Singapore CM is 13 dollars an hour!  I GUARANTEE you could get someone to
tune things up and do a good job in the US for that rate!  You could get
some high schooler hams to do it for that wage and they'd love their jobs
and take great pride in it.  

Our biggest problem where I work is that we're idiots.  Our system only
allows for one price to be put into the system and that price is put into
the system when the engineers are buying prototype quantities.  So then when
we print out a BOM cost its heavily inflated because they are onesy twosey
costs.  Then when they ship this BOM overseas they are amazed at how much
less expensive it is overseas.  They think that this is because of the
"buying power" that the contract manufacturers have.  But it's only because
our costs are so inflated.  Not to mention the severe speed decrease that
you have to take when changes are needed.  As well the fact that many
contract manufacturers build a lot more than you ask them to and when you
make a change your scrap costs can end up MUCH higher than you planned for.
They usually make way more than you ask them to as it helps them cut costs
but they rarely pass these savings onto you and have no problems passing the
obsolescence cost onto you when it's their actions that increased that cost
beyond what you specified.

Just the other day I found a place where a contract manufacturer was double
charging us for a part and we'd ended up overpaying by about 3/4 of a
million dollars over the last couple years.  They made no offer of repayment
but made up a story about how it was not their fault and how we'd agreed to
pay the price we were paying.  

So I'm not so sure it really makes all that much "business sense".  Things
keep getting more and more expensive over there.  Heck as the US dollar
keeps going further and further down in value then that only makes it all
the more expensive.  

Not to mention the fact that Wayne and Eric would be in planes constantly
going over to the CM to try and flesh out problems then firmware updates
would be even lower on the priority list of things to manage.  But there
would be tons of radios out there which makes them worth less money to the
end user this only cuts into the bottom line of the manufacturer though.

Feel free to flame away but I've done quite a bit of design with overseas
manufactures.  I LOVE it when we're making boards domestically for
prototypes and HATE getting work done once its gone overseas.  The
unfortunate thing is that we're so stupid now our operations department is
looking into selling our SMT equipment and looking at making us do all of
our prototyping overseas.  No more 5 day turn fabs!  Any and all changes
will take several weeks to get anything back and will cost a heck of a lot
more.  

-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Bill W5WVO
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 4:57 PM
To: Dave Andrus; elecraft at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] ARRL Reports Ducie Operator's K3 Comments

I would be very surprised if outsourcing manufacturing has NOT been thought 
about and discussed behind closed doors. How could you not at least think 
about that with production being as backlogged as it is? I wouldn't expect
to 
see this any time soon, because it would take many, many months to set this
up 
with standards high enough for Elecraft, but if this radio comes to dominate

both the high-end performance and mid-range price-point markets, it seems
like 
a no-brainer to me. Is this heresy? Maybe... :-) But seems to me it's
reality 
business-wise.

Bill W5WVO


Dave Andrus wrote:
> Time to go "big time" with an offshore production line!?  Maybe Yaesu/
> Motorola will subcontract it for them!
>
> I'm kidding...just kidding...;-)
>
> 73,
>
> Dave K7DAA
> http://www.k7daa.com
>
> On Feb 29, 2008, at 11:54 AM, Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
>
>> The quickly-becoming-famous quote by the Ducie Dxpedition team was
>> picked up
>> in the ARRL e-mail letter today:
>>
>> * Elecraft K3 radio. They said "The outstanding receiver and
>> transmitter
>> characteristics allowed us to run two positions simultaneously on
>> any band
>> -- even the very narrow 30 meter band -- with absolutely no
>> interference.
>> Good design makes the complex appear simple: the ins and outs of this
>> sophisticated radio were quickly mastered by the operator team, none
>> of whom
>> had seen a K3 before the expedition."
>>
>> Time for Eric/Wayne to take a deep breath and smile again!
>>
>> Ron AC7AC
>>
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