Some of the approaches are rather obvious, such as buying greater volumes, producing larger batches or using a more cost effective method of transportation.
One solution that is never acceptable is compromising the integrity, performance, quality or aesthetics of the circuit boards or their specification in any way.
Where Momentum Circuits find particular success in the cost reduction process, is by reviewing every aspect of materials, processes, panelisation and best fit to manufacturing substrates to ensure that we are not only engineering the printed circuit boards in an optimised fashion, but also with no performance compromises at all.
Quite often, we can achieve considerable material savings by recommending an alternative panelisation as an alternative to what has been requested.
The panelisation can also look at where waste material isn't actually necessary (usually leading or trailing edge of the manufacturing panels) and also by the more efficient use of v-scoring, narrower routing and reduction of waste material between circuits on a panel.
Quite often the individual savings made by these changes can see to be small or trivial, but cumulatively, they can amount to a quite surprising commercial saving.
Momentum are also happy to review a range of boards collectively rather than as individual part numbers in order to achieve a greater global saving and economy of scale.
We will not speculate on optimistic volumes that cannot be guaranteed to achieve a saving, but we will look at the total package cost and end-user price to achieve more for you.
We can also look at the creative use of 'mixed panel work' where several designs are pooled together in order to bring about further savings.
It is not unusual for Momentum to reduce your board spend by up to 25% by using a combination of best practice and optimising your panels.