Documenting for Production

The contract engineer has finalized a custom PCB design for an upcoming startup. The next step is to order a run of prototypes for testing. After many months of raising capital, marketing their product, and garnering sales, the customer is in the home stretch of their first release. Once the prototypes are up and running, it will be time to scale up to a production run and fulfill the first set of orders.

Somewhere between ordering prototype boards and delivering the tested units, the contract engineer will send a package of the finished assembly files to the startup. This file-set contains all documents pertaining to the released design. A complete assembly package allows the customer to order an exact replica of the design — resistor-for-resistor, and trace-for-trace — resulting in production assemblies that have the exact performance characteristics of the prototype assemblies.

It is imperative that the contract engineer delivers this data package to their customer with complete data integrity. This is only possible if all changes throughout the manufacturing process have been documented by engineering and relayed back to the customer. One change left out of the delivered assembly data can lead to the failure of an entire production lot.

A realistic and frequent scenario is that — after a board is placed on order — the manufacture discovers one or two parts that are no longer available through distribution. In this case, the manufacturer will propose a set of alternates to the engineer, or they will ask the engineer how to proceed. Once changes are agreed upon, it is critical that each deviation to the assembly package is rolled back to the bill of materials and the schematic, and that a revised file package is relayed to the customer. Without these key steps, data integrity is lost, and a future production run will fail to replicate the prototypes.

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At Engineering Design Group, we have a background designing for mission critical applications, and we understand that high quality is directly correlated to documenting all changes prompted by the manufacturing process. Stringent documentation procedures are part of our design process whether we are developing hardware for our clients or our own secure remote monitoring products.

If your company is interested in our design expertise or learning about our quality processes, or if you would like to learn more about EDG’s secure remote integrations, contact us today.