How many bad management decisions have you seen from me or my company (OpenPandora GmbH) so far and what would you have made better?
* Totally reliant on a single manufacturer for the boards.
That's normal for every product, because, as stated above, otherwise it costs time and money.
Programming the machines, making the stencil, preparing the prototypes, etc. all trigger one-time costs of about 5000 - 10,000 EUR with such a complicated product.
They also give you a price reduction for mass ordering - so while you pay maybe 20 EUR per PCB if you produce 4000 it goes up to 40 - 50 EUR per PCB if you produce only 1000 at that company.
So split up 4000 orders to 4 different companies, you pay an additional:
* about 30,000 EUR for higher one-time-costs
* about 20 EUR per PCB more because you only order 1000 PCBs at once.
This leads to additional costs of 110,000 EUR, or 27,5 EUR per unit.
Doesn't make sense.
Usually, a proper company similar produces the unit.
* Upsetting the original customers of your product, before it's even in their hands
Only a few ones are upset. With 4000 customers, it's nigh impossible to find a solution that will suit everyone.
However, the other solution would've been to quit the whole thing so the original customers would've lost the money and would never get a Pandora.
Do you really think this would've been the proper way?
* Pricing the unit at below cost, when you're not in a position to fund a 'loss-leader'
Well, that was not me or my company that priced the unit, it was actually Craigs, but he didn't price it below costs.
The costs were covered, with the quotations the companies gave us.
And if they would've properly manufactured it and not killed 1000 PCBs, the price would've been fine.
You ALWAYS include a certain failure rate in a calculation. And a typical failure rate for such PCB production is 3 - 5%, sometimes up to 8%.
We got over 25% from the old company right now. NO one would include that in their calculation!
