Lieban.com 4 days ago In the eyes of outsiders, procurement belongs to Party A, which is the powerful party in selecting suppliers. If the PCB supplier has high prices and poor service, it can be replaced at any time. But in fact, the procurement work is not that easy. Screening out a stable and high-quality PCB supplier often faces pain points such as price, delivery time, and quality.

So how to solve these pain points in procurement? Is there any way to easily handle PCB procurement? The answer is yes. Mature procurement by large manufacturers all follow standard processes, which standardizes the procurement work and makes it easy to be recognized at work. This is a set of procurement process methods summarized by Lieban after communicating with many buyers from major manufacturers. I would like to share them with you. I hope it will be helpful to everyone.  
Going directly to the topic, a complete supplier selection process should include product demand positioning, creation of supplier pool, supplier analysis, and confirmation of cooperative suppliers.   
    1 ·. Product demand positioningFirst, you must analyze your own product demand positioning and be sure to understand these details. Plate material, process requirements, purchase quantity evaluation, brand or quality requirements, supplier geographical requirements, supplier scale requirements, and material delivery time.   
First, look at what type of PCB the product requires. Secondly, look at the difficulty of your PCB process and find one with corresponding process capabilities. Then it depends on your production volume. If the monthly order volume is a few hundred pieces, then it is a small batch for the PCB factory. In this way, you can find a matching factory. Different factories have different positioning. Only by finding the right one can the cooperation be smoother.  
For example, if your company does a lot of R&D and has small to medium-sized products, you would look for one that has fast prototyping, is moderately priced, and has a small MOQ. If your company produces fast-selling products in batches and the delivery time is relatively urgent, you should look for one with fast delivery and stable quality. If your company produces high-end boards and high-precision boards, look for the industry leader.   
    2 ·. Create a supplier poolOnce the product requirements are clear, the next step is to create a supplier pool. Looking for suppliers is not just for those who don’t have supplier resources. Some companies already have supplier resources, and they also need to optimize the existing supplier resource structure.  
So how to find it? In fact, it is mainly through several channels: Baidu, Alibaba, Moments, and professional exhibitions. Take Baidu as an example. When searching, you should collect the factory brands you are interested in from multiple dimensions, check the content of the brand under the knowledge, news and other columns, and learn more about its strength and reputation. Because of Baidu’s ranking mechanism, the first few rankings are all bidding advertising spaces. This one is also easy to distinguish, as there is an advertising logo at the bottom. In the same way, for the brands we see on Alibaba and at exhibitions, we can use Baidu to collect content to check their strength profile, and then select a few good ones and put them into the supplier pool.  
    3 ·. Supplier analysisAfter preliminary screening of satisfactory suppliers, a further round of in-depth screening will be carried out. In this process, judgments can be made from the following dimensions: supplier product capabilities (manufacturing capabilities), supplier production capacity, production quality management, supplier's supply chain management capabilities, and supplier's risk resistance capabilities.  
In the first step of demand analysis, we talk about process requirements, and we need to find a factory that matches the process capabilities and process requirements. Then judge the factory's production capacity and management capabilities, because this involves delivery and quality assurance. Finally, analyze the strength and background of the supplier and whether it has the ability to resist risks. To put it bluntly, factories with sufficient financial strength have higher risk resistance capabilities. In the past two years, there have been many cases of closure of small and medium-sized PCB factories, which has actually increased the production risks of purchasers.  
    4 ·. Supplier decision-makingAfter completing the above work carefully, it is basically easy for you to decide who is your target supplier. It is also recommended to retain 2 to 3 high-quality and reliable suppliers to build a healthy and stable supplier pool. Of course, in addition to the above steps, you can also audit the factory on site. You can pay more attention to instruments and equipment, on-site 6S, production sites, etc., and go into the factory to learn more about its strength.  
PCB plays a vital role in the performance and life of electronic products. Downstream customers of PCB products have higher requirements for PCB quality and generally adopt the "qualified supplier certification system" with a long inspection cycle. Once a long-term and stable cooperative relationship is formed, suppliers will not be easily changed. Therefore, spending more effort in the early stage will reduce a lot of trouble in subsequent cooperation.