At RBB, we pride ourselves on being trusted partners to our customers. By building solid customer relationships, we’ve learned the attributes our customers value in an outsourcing partner.

RBB recently served as a Global Sponsor and Exhibitor at the Cleveland Engineering Society's Annual Industry and Manufacturing Conference held at Lorain Community College's Spitzer Conference Center.

I get a lot of phone calls from entrepreneurs and business owners who are developing a product that has some kind of electronic component. They’re often looking for a new partner to produce parts of the product - or even the entire thing - and are sometimes new to navigating the ways of electronic contract manufacturing.

Embarking on a new outsourced custom electronics project can be full of concerns – and certainly items that you’ll want to have addressed by your outsourcing partner up front. Whether you are an original equipment manufacturer in need of a small batch of custom electronic assemblies for your own product, or a contract manufacturer and want to leverage the volume requirements of an outsourcing partner in order to pass the savings on to your customers, an outsourced relationship is potentially very valuable. As you get started, you’ll want to keep the following seven considerations in mind.

Last month, RBB employees Steve Baker and Tim Crossland joined technicians, engineers, and quality technicians at the IPC Training center located at AP Solutions in Cleveland to learn from Master IPC Trainer, Benny Mostella Jr. The sole goal of the two-day workshop they attended was to train and qualify attendees to become Certified IPC Trainers (CIT).

You’re an OEM who has developed a solid supplier relationship with an electronics job shop, whether they are local or across the country. The shop has proven themselves to be reliable, responsive, and cost competitive, especially in small batches (the work that many of the larger batch CM’s often avoid). You are happy with your job shop’s performance and want to award them more work. What will you do? Let’s explore a few options. 

The world is constantly changing. As with anything, you either go with the flow embracing the change or exhaust yourself trying to swim upstream avoiding it. Why continue doing the same things over and over again when there is a more efficient way? As a small batch electronics manufacturer, we’ve learned to go with the flow and strive for continuous improvement in all aspects of our business.

Once in a while, a customer comes to us with a PCB assembly job where they already have parts on hand wanting to know if we can incorporate these existing parts into their job. The parts may have been purchased because a bulk order was needed to get the one or two pieces for a prototype or maybe the customer used to produce the boards in-house and has a remaining inventory of components. Regardless of the reason, most times, we can incorporate these into the job without issue.

Working as a technician in the SMT Department at RBB Systems has definitely been an interesting experience, since it’s the work center where our production really begins. Two major pieces of manufacturing equipment; the Mydata MY15 and TP-9, do the machine placement (known as “pick and place”) of small surface-mounted electronic components. These machines “pick” each individual component from a reel in a magazine and “place” it onto a bare circuit board. Proper programming of the machines plays an important role in performance and quality. Trained operators populate the boards by utilizing certifications earned, including J-STD-001, IPC-A-610, IPC 7711/7721, and others. Training is provided by both the equipment manufacturers and by our experienced mechanical engineers.