>> >      Everyone out there really needs to talk to a guy in Taiwan who will
>> >      give his mother and his left nut for a micro that costs 10 cents less.
>> >      The real world can be a scary place!
>>
>> What is the E-mail address of this guy in Taiwan, I can't get constant
>> prices or supplies in Australia, and MicroChip offer no alternatives for
>> me.
>
>I'm not trying to single out anyone in particular but I'm curious to know
>whether the people who complain so much about price, etc. sell their own
>products, services, labor at bargain basement prices just because the
>people who buy from them don't want to pay very much?
>
I worked for a company that made garage door openers radios, about 1.2
million units a year. We would let a 40k/year engineer work for three weeks
to eliminate one jumper on a single sided board. At .3 cents each it cost
many thousands of dollars to use that part.

In addition we would let work an extra two or three weeks on a layout just
to get the parts lined up so the head on the automatic insertion machine
did not have to turn. That turn takes about half a second but it works out
to several man-weeks per year of machine time in the quantities we were
doing.

I felt sorry, well sometimes, for the parts manufacturers. We used to beat
them mercilessly. I remember meeting 3 different EEPROM makers on the same
day to try to save a penny a part. Again, a penny is not much, but 1.2
million of them is something to write home about. And in this case we saved
7 of those shiny pennys on each EEPROM.

Our market was extreamly competitive. Eventually, someone was importing a
finished product for less than we could buy the parts for.

Now I am back in my own company doing custom stuff. Usually, it just
doesn't matter how much something costs. Nothing is more important than
time. I have used a MC68HC811E2 at $18.00 each to do a  485 bus keyswitch
box that interfaced a switch and two leds. It was cheaper, on 50 pcs, to
use the $900 worth of parts than it would have been to spend a week
re-writing the serial protocol for a 6805 or PIC.

And as far as allocation, it's part of life in the mass production game.
Saving some cost later is better than never saving it at all. Also, you
schedule say 50,000 pcs a month of something to keep the pipeline moving
and then take bigger sums when they are available.

John Bean

Advanced Telemetry Systems
jrb@gate.net