PCBA suppliers come in a variety of different sizes and stages of financial integrity. Choosing the one that will perform the best for your requirements is an important element to the success of your application. Knowing what questions to ask your PCBA supplier is essential in choosing who will be manufacturing your PCBAs.

The following are a few questions that should be asked and answered as part of your supplier vetting and selection process:

Do you follow IPC-9701A standards?

Budgetary quoting?

Where are the manufacturing facilities located?

Any other specific certifications?

Sanitation

1) Do you follow IPC-9701A standards?

This standard covers a very wide range of PCBA and cable assembly for the applications. It is critical to ensuring that a design will be both functional and reliable. Some of the more important areas this standard addresses are components selection, bend capabilities, and assembly requirements.

Due to its wide scope it requires supplier experience to first evaluate a design and then identify the specifics within IPC-9701A that apply and which do not. This can significantly streamline the design process.

Failing to adhere to all IPC 9701 elements that apply to a specific design will lead to significant performance, reliability, and mufacturability issues.

2)Budgetary Quoting?

A supplier should be willing to support the customer with budgetary quotes at the early concept/design stages. This provides the customer with important costing information to allow for informed decisions to be made as to how to move forward with a specific design. As part of this, budgetary quotes need to be as accurate as possible under the circumstances.

3)Where Are The Manufacturing Facilities Located?

The location of a supplier's manufacturing facility can have a significant bearing on decisions made during the engineering process. Usually, customers prefer designs that where prototyped domestically but where not designed or optimized for volume off-shore production which caused significant issues and costs as the design transitioned into production.Hence, choose suitable supplier according to different stages in your projects, which could save more money for you.

4)Any Other Specific Certifications?

It is important to ensure that your supplier supports any additional certification requirements that may only come to apply once the design is beyond the prototype stage. Some of the more common are ISO13485,AS9100,UL,and IPC Class 3. Not all suppliers support all standards and some may impact the requirements.

5)Sanitation

Sanitation reflects the responsibility of plant manager directly. You may say the quality of products is not determined by the workshp sanitation, but if with good sanitation condition, workers and staffs will be more comfortable when they produce or assembly your products.At same time, if the rights of worker are guaranteed well, to some extent you can trust this supplier more because they pay attentions to something others not only profits.

Summary

When looking for a PCBA supplier, remember this post and these 4 questions. It might not be a bad idea to look back at your current PCBA suppliers and see what their response to these questions may be.