How to manage China

Description

Managing an overseas manufacturing partner can be extremely challenging. Here’s why:
- If you’re a young start-up, you probably don’t yet know exactly what you want
- Manufacturers are good at managing clear problems, not uncertainty
- You understand the technology, but they understand the process
- Manufacturing is about repetition. If they’ve never done it before, they’re probably not interested in learning
- Language barrier. ’Nuff said

A lot of the issues of working with a manufacturing partner surface during the RFQ (request for quote) process, where you take the information you’ve developed on your prototype and quote it out for manufacturing. If done well, this process can present you with a capable, flexible, cost-effective manufacturing partner. If done poorly, this process will present you with an endless list of problems.

The team at Particle learned this first-hand when we first began manufacturing our development kit, the Particle Core. We ended up with a great manufacturer and now we ship large volumes of high-quality hardware around the world on a regular basis. But we learned a lot of lessons the hard way.

In this tutorial, you’ll be handed a prototype product that you need to source. You’ll put together an RFQ and send it out to a few manufacturers (played by members of the Particle) team. Over the course of the tutorial, you will negotiate with these manufacturers and eventually pick one (along with the negotiated final price).

When you leave this tutorial, you should have an understanding of how hardware is sourced, and be ready to start scaling up manufacturing.

Prizes to the teams who “win” their negotiations!