About Manufacturing Reports

I would like to share a little bit about Manufacturing Reports, and why it came to be.

Working in the rapid prototyping industry, speed is of the essence. A day came when I needed some boards made fast, and my usual quick turn supplier wasn’t responding. I had to find a new fab before the end of business. Based on available information, there was no way to select one from another and they all seemed to receive the little five star reviews.

Essentially, there was no independent resource showing the quality of the boards being produced by the manufacturers.

As I grew more frustrated at having to make a blind decision, the more I realized how daunting it would be to produce a resource like that. Someone would have to design a standardized board, then spend their own money to send that design out to a bunch of manufacturers, figure out how to evaluate that board in-house, then tell everyone about how good or bad those boards were.

Manufacturing Reports changes that. Manufacturing Reports is the independent voice looking with a critical eye.

That’s what I do. I designed the Manufacturing Reports Test Coupon as the standard. I pay for a prototype run of 10 boards with each manufacturer myself — no manufacturers pay for their review. The review criteria are developed through researching the manufacturer’s own published tolerances and what the IPC recommends. This site is how I tell everyone about how the evaluation turns out.

In order for this content to have honest value, it has to be consistent and independent. You have to be able to trust me when I say something is good or bad, and a manufacturer has to trust that the reviews aren’t vindictive or looking for compensation. I try to show not only the binary “board good / board fail” side of things, but the grey areas too of lesser quality versus better quality versus perfection. Ultimately, the reviews must be fair and I believe they are.

If you would like to reach out, you can find Manufacturing Reports on Twitter and Linked In.