Getting off the Drawing Board
In addition to our Advisory and Design services, we also offer a range of “virtual manufacturing” services, including box build/final assembly, enclosure manufacture & electronic manufacturing services to suit our customers needs via our approved OEM partners. We are able to completely manage the complexities of the manufacturing process on your behalf – this ranges from prototype manufacture in rapid timescales (1-3 days possible) to volume production in UK, EU, near-EU and Asia including Shenzhen. As a virtual manufacturer we have a wide variety of capacity and capability options available to us and this allows our customers get the best deal from both a price and performance perspective.
Working alongside our partners from a pool of our approved Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) and Contract Electronics Manufacturers (CEMs), our experience working as engineers in both design and manufacturing environments, coupled with a deep understanding of our OEMs businesses processes allows us to seamlessly transfer your product to manufacture, cutting through technical, geographical and cultural barriers. Understanding the right partner to use for a particular production job and having a deep pre-existing relationship with an OEM is key to ensure on-time delivery, low cost and trouble free production.
Our services include:
- Rapid Circuit Prototyping – with breadboard & development kits to get a “proof of concept” solution quickly.
- Rush PCB manufacture – with part procurement & 3D printing of mechanical assemblies or enclosures on up to a 1-3 day turnaround (including weekends and holidays).
- Manufacture Readiness Review – including “front-end” fabrication and build Design Rule Checks (DRC) to fly through New Product Introduction (NPI) and on to trouble free manufacture.
- Manufacture Data Packs – containing all the information needed to get your design turned into a physical product. This includes all relevant information required for build such as gerbers, CAD files, drawings and instructions as required for NPI.
- Part Procurement – Full Bill of Material part procurement for prototype & volume manufacture from our approved distribution and direct from manufacturers with high levels of discount. Call-off and consignment stock options are available.
- Unbiased BoM Selection – As a virtual manufacturer we hold no local component production stock, and this means we are unbiased when it comes to choosing the right component technology for our customers designs – we have no leftover parts from previous jobs to get rid of !
- Full turnkey manufacturing services – in UK, EU, near-EU and Asia including Shenzhen as chosen by the customer, including logistics, warehousing and drop shipping.
- Split Manufacture and Final Assembly – we are able to arrange the manufacturing of different subcomponents of your product in different locations for commercial or security reasons. We can also supervise and control final assembly/programming or undertake these activities (for limited quantities) at our site in Lancaster where sensitivity or security is crucial.
Pre-Production Engineering
We also offer a variety of pre-production engineering services including:
- Production Test Equipment – hardware/software fixtures and Automatic Test Equipment for test/programming/configuration/secure serialisation that can be kept as part of the design and free-issued to manufacturers as required.
- Secure Production Provisioning – use of secure programming tools to ensure untrusted OEMs are limited in programming/reusing our customers intellectual property such as firmware to avoid product “cloning”.
- Production Test Documentation – including testing procedures, checklists and production QA documentation.
