Episode 3 of the Pick, Place, Podcast is live! This week we are joined by Brett and Magnus from Worthington to talk about parts and parts purchasing.

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Intro

-Brett and Magnus give us a brief overview of what they do at Worthington and what they did before joining Worthington.

-We reflect on a twelve pound circuit board we are making and some of the challenges that come along with building something so big!

-Brett and Magnus discuss the differences in the part buying process for Worthington vs CircuitHub.

-How has COVID-19 affect parts purchasing and shipping?

Questions from customers

-Why is this out of stock?

-Why is my order held up? (What causes delays in delivering a product to a customer?)

-Why are these parts more expensive than when we previously bought them?

-We talk about how tariffs on parts get handled and billed (it’s not as simple as you might think).

-What is markup and why does it exist?

Recommendations to customers

-Use parts that are widely available in the supply chain.

-Speciy alternative parts that can be substituted whenever possible.

-Keep the lifecycle of the part in mind when designing your board - don’t use parts that are obsolete or nearing their EOL.

-Keep MOQs in mind.

-Small decisions early on can have a huge impact later on.

-Avoid using parts from hobbyist website - they are great for your personal projects but are not designed for professionally produced products.

-Be very careful (and sometimes suspicious) of buying parts from unauthorized distributors.

-Ask us if there’s anything different that they could do to improve the purchasing process?

Up next

We’ll continue the second half of the conversation in the next episode to discuss this things we wish customers knew and the whole subject of consignment.  

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Full transcript:

[00:00:00] Chris: Welcome to the Pick, Place, Podcast, the show where we talk about electronics manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington,

[00:00:19] Melissa: and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.

[00:00:21] Chris: And a pretty excited today because we're going to have a chance to speak to a couple folks from our purchasing team over in Worthington who also assist obviously with CircuitHub purchasing.

[00:00:33] So we've got Brett and Magnus from Worthington. Uh, thanks for joining us guys.

[00:00:39] Melissa: Yeah. Welcome guys.

[00:00:40] Magnus: Hey!

[00:00:41] Brett: Of course. Great to be here.

[00:00:43] Chris: So, uh, it's, uh, pretty exciting to get a chance to be able to talk to people who are actually doing the actual work. Unlike a couple of carpet walkers here, Melissa and I, who just get to sit on the carpet all day and watch things happen.

[00:00:58] Uh, uh, but, uh, so Brett and Magnus up there, their background briefly is that they're doing purchasing for us and they're, uh, making sure that all the parts arrive in the condition you expect them to arrive in, but we'll, we'll, uh, maybe Brett, if you want to share a little bit about, uh, uh, briefly, you know, in a couple sentences what your day job is like.

[00:01:22] Brett: Yeah. So I'm the project manager here at Worthington Assembly and purchasing is a, is a large part of what I do. Uh, in addition to quoting, uh, working with, uh, Worthington customers directly to ensure that their orders go smoothly, uh, as well as supporting the assembly team here, making sure that all the folks here working and building boards have what they need in order to get things built and out the door.

[00:01:47] Chris: So you are the, the hub that all the spokes are attached to, uh,

[00:01:54] Brett: I prefer to think of myself as the secretary of everyone here.

[00:02:01] Chris: Brett. Can you do this for me, Brett? Can you do that for me? That's awesome.

[00:02:05] Brett: So, um, it, it was mostly just support.

[00:02:08] Chris: Beautiful. And, uh, and Magnus, if you want to give us a quick, a couple of sentences and explain what your day-to-day work.

[00:02:17] Magnus: Yeah. I mostly do a purchasing for parts, not so much for the bare boards. And my job is basically make sure that the parts get here in time. Correct. Number of parts and nothing's missing and preferably within budget,

[00:02:32] Chris: preferably within budget. Yeah.

[00:02:36] Magnus: It's there there's a right way to do things. And, and then there's the, uh, let's say cheap way to do things.

[00:02:41] We gotta make sure that the right way is where we go we go. We're almost,

[00:02:46] Chris: yeah.

[00:02:48] Magnus: There's also a lot of, uh, paperwork that needs to happen before a jobs gets set up before the physical work begins to go over the SMT instructions and things like that, and make sure that all gets communicated to the team on the floor.

[00:03:00] That's sort of the other, other half of what I do. Yeah.

[00:03:03] Chris: And that's very typical for everybody between both Worthington and CircuitHub nobody really does one job. Everybody. We're all involved in so much. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. So, uh, Brett, before we get started, maybe you could give us a little bit of a background of where you came from and how you ended up at Worthington.

[00:03:23] Brett: I've been at Worthington for just about five years, I believe next, next week will be, uh, my fifth year here. And when I, when I started here at Worthington five years ago, I was not doing anything. I was doing a completely different job. Uh, I started working in shipping and receiving. And learned Kitting um, would help, uh, kit get things out to the, to the assembly floor, uh, shipping at the end of the day, I was I'd go into the office.

[00:03:54] I would, I would assist with some accounting, uh, whenever the need rose. And eventually I, I started working more specifically doing, um, kind of administrative stuff. And, and it's important to note when I first got hired at Worthington, I was fresh out of college. I had no electrical engineering background.

[00:04:16] I had no manufacturing.

[00:04:18] Chris: What'd you go to school for?

[00:04:19] Brett: I went to school for, uh, political science, with a focus on, uh, the middle east. I studied Arabic language for four years and, uh, political science and economics.

[00:04:32] Chris: So not electronics manufacturing

[00:04:34] Brett: Nothing related to this, nothing at all. And. I, when I walked into Worthington, I had no idea that this was even still being done in the United States.

[00:04:44] It was a complete shock to me. It was, I was so excited when I took my first tour here to see in Western, Massachusetts, a factory doing what was being done here. And at that point, uh, the machines that we currently have on the floor, where I think every machine on that floor at the moment, it was not there except for the reflow

[00:05:08] oven, the reflow oven and our,

[00:05:10] Chris: and our selective soldering machine.

[00:05:13] Brett: Oh, yep, yep, yep. And the rhythm, the rhythm. But, uh, it was, it was really, it was a shock to me and I was, I was very lucky to kind of, uh, to find a spot here and over the course of the last five years, my, my I've just kind of, uh, started or learned along the way, uh, you know, how to do different things, right.

[00:05:37] Um, now I do every, you know, I, my main goal here is to support the people who are actually assembling boards. We kind of joke that, uh, the administrative folks are are carpet walkers, but really at the end of the day, that is my goal. Whether we're doing a rate, you know, whether I'm processing X, Y data into something the machines can, can, can work with, to, to place machines or ordering stencils and tooling.

[00:06:04] Um, the goal is to execute the schedule and get, get the assembly folks there. They're my end customer. Yeah. kitting in the, and the line and, and try to get them what they need. Okay. Um,

[00:06:15] Chris: well, and, uh, it doing a heck of a job, so yeah. Otherwise you wouldn't have been here for five years, I guess. Huh? Um, awesome.

[00:06:22] So, uh, Magnus, if you can give us a, kind of a similar background and, and, uh, perhaps like Brett mentioned, uh, how he got started at Worthington versus, or how you got started at Worthington versus maybe what you're doing today. Um,

[00:06:38] Magnus: my background's a little bit different if you hadn't figured it out by my accent, but I'm, uh, didn't grow up in the U S I'm actually from my Iceland and went to school for business.

[00:06:48] And I bounced around quite a variety of different jobs before starting work at the Worthington. But, uh, mostly I worked in the packaging or, well, similar to you, Chris sales about manufacturing equipment, mostly on the packaging site then, uh, after I began working at Worthington. Much like Brett I cycled through most departments in the company, especially shipping and, uh, things that touch on, on the parts and, you know, later on assembly as well.

[00:07:19] Chris: Yeah. I've seen you out on the manufacturing line before helping those guys.

[00:07:23] Magnus: Yeah. I think a lot of us can hop in on most, most, uh, aspects of, of the assembly and, uh, sort of the, the value chain from when, the parts get in the door to when they leave the building, because that is a lot of things that require a lot of expertise in a lot of, uh, experience such as inspection and soldering.

[00:07:44] I can't do. That's a very particular skill.

[00:07:47] Chris: Yeah. I, I pretend that I know how to solder, but let's be honest. I really don't know what I'm doing compared to the folks who are doing it every single day.

[00:07:54] Magnus: Yeah. That's. Uh, interesting skill to see people develop over the years. I certainly can't. Uh, can't sit in those seats and do their jobs.

[00:08:05] Chris: Yeah. And I mean, how could you, I mean, you're so used to walking on carpet now. I'm not sure that your feet can handle the manufacturing floor.

[00:08:15] Awesome. Um, um, you know, normally we would like to take a few minutes just to talk about what the past few weeks have been like. I know one thing that's been on my mind is we had a, a customer placed an order for a really, really large circuit board. Something that our equipment is not designed to handle.

[00:08:34] And, uh, that's been pretty exciting trying to figure out how in the world we're going to build this thing, but they, we told them ahead of time, right? Remember this conversation, Brett? Oh,

[00:08:44] Brett: yes. This was a, this is weeks and weeks in the making and, uh, involved a lot of people here and a lot of reliance on, uh, your expertise as well as, uh, other folks here.

[00:08:55] Yeah.

[00:08:56] Chris: And, and the, you know, I think what was important is we told them like, Hey, we've never done this before, are you okay with us tackling this? You know? And then, you know, now we've had all kinds of shipping delays with special tools and oh yeah. Good stuff, beautiful stuff. But, uh, yeah. Um, I'm looking forward to building those things.

[00:09:17] That's going to be, it's going to be a real treat. I'm sure. Everybody's going to look at those here. We're probably not even going to have boxes big enough to ship these things.

[00:09:26] Brett: Pass the trays and have a courier pickup.

[00:09:29] Chris: Yeah, I, is that seriously? What we're planning on doing?

[00:09:32] Brett: Yes. Yeah. We're going to ship those out on trays.

[00:09:34] There'll be too heavy to actually safely ship. Yeah. They're expected to weigh about 12 pounds. The ferrite cores on the inductors, uh, alone are about eight pounds uninstalled.

[00:09:47] Chris: Oh my a 12 pound circuit board.

[00:09:49] Melissa: Each board is 12

[00:09:50] Brett: pounds. Yeah. About

[00:09:52] Chris: that. That's cool. Yeah. That's exciting. So that was kind of a neat thing that happened this week.

[00:09:58] And, you know, there's always kinds of weird stuff going on and excited to be able to kind of stretch our legs a little bit, get a little exercise and see if we can build something that we've never done before. I'm, I'm pretty confident we'll be okay. I think we'll figure it out. Um, but so the reason we're bringing on Magnus and Brett this week is because we really wanted to get a chance to talk about what it's like to actually get parts into the building.

[00:10:22] And it's an, obviously a very oversimplified version of what purchasing is like, but maybe if, uh, Uh, if Brett, if you want to speak a little bit about, you know, real briefly your process of ordering parts versus Magnus, your, your, your process of ordering parts, because I know, uh, while you two share responsibilities and you overlap in what you do most of the time, I know Brett, mostly you focus on ordering parts for our Worthington direct customers and Magnus.

[00:10:52] I know you spend a significant majority of your time ordering parts for our CircuitHub orders. So maybe Brett, if you want to talk about a little bit of what your process is like, and, and, and that sort of thing, and who you buy from and you know, where you click and all that kind of stuff.

[00:11:09] Brett: Sure. So, um, Within the last couple of years, we've actually drastically improved our purchasing process, uh, to support Worthington direct customers, uh, through the use of some, some pretty cool API based software that allows us to buy faster and more accurately.

[00:11:27] Um, the old school way of buying was essentially to create a quote in an Excel sheet, and then use that as your, uh, kind of your instructions for buying. Uh, we now rely a lot on software based exports to tell us what we should be buying, how much we should be buying and from where in order to get the best price.

[00:11:49] Um, and more importantly, uh, the best lead time to get those parts here as quickly as possible. Um, so our buying process really begins in our quoting process. Our quoting software is going to generate those buy sheets for us. And that helps maintain a continuity between a buy that we might do to support in order this year. Uh, and, uh, by that we might do to support a repeat order next year.

[00:12:19] Chris: And probably also does that help, like with budgeting, like staying within budget, once you actually cause you're you're, if you're using the same quoting, you're the same tool to do quoting that helps you to do purchasing, does it help you keep in budget

[00:12:32] Brett: Of course, budget is, is a really, is a very important thing.

[00:12:36] And not only does it help you stay within budget, but it also helps us. When we go back to a customer, let's say a year or two from now, it helps us to explain to them, know this there's a price increase, and we can point to exact lines in the bill of material and explain, uh, last time we were able to get it from vendor X, Y, Z, at this price, we now have to get it from.

[00:13:00] You know, vendor ABC at a higher price, um, or in some cases, uh, prices go down, uh, we get better price discounts as time goes on and, and we're able to, to, uh, be a little bit more competitive

[00:13:13] Chris: if I need a good deal. You can always come to Chris denny's electronic shop.

[00:13:17] Brett: That's sort through all your cardboard boxes.

[00:13:21] Chris: Yeah, exactly.

[00:13:22] Brett: But essentially once the, once a we have given a customer a quote and they come back to us, we generate a buy sheet out of our quoting software. And then we will go to any number of vendors, uh, most popular among our supply chain. Or Digi-Key, Mouser, uh, we work a lot with Aero, future TTI, uh, Highland.

[00:13:45] We might use one, we might use 12 vendors to support any particular order. Uh, it all depends on the complexity of the parts involved and, and the supply chain.

[00:13:55] Chris: Can you give us an example of, of. Y maybe you would buy from one vendor versus another, like where exactly, or how exactly are you making that decision besides price?

[00:14:10] Is there any other factors of why you would buy from one vendor or another?

[00:14:14] Brett: So certain vendors specialize in certain types of technology, for example, a Digi-Key, they specialize in everything, everything under the sun, you can find at Digi-Key, but if you're working with a really expensive, uh, interconnect or connector products in those cases, oftentimes going over to TTI or Highland vendors that are a little bit more specialized in those areas, uh, tend to have better pricing, secondary to pricing, uh, is just the fact that the, the longer the list of vendors gets the more labor is involved in the actual receiving team handling all of those incoming boxes, right? Sorting all of those incoming parts from a multitude of vendors. So when we can we take into account things like shipping costs, the amount of labor that'll be expended, uh, during the kitting process, uh, if we can buy a part for $20 cheaper at one vendor, but it's going to cost $10 in shipping plus another half hour.

[00:15:18] And, uh, in kitting time, we'll, we'll oftentimes just stick with the vendor that costs 10 bucks more because it's more, it comes down to a matter of process efficiency at that point.

[00:15:29] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's more costs than just what you pay your vendor, right? Yes.

[00:15:33] Brett: There are labor costs. There are shipping costs.

[00:15:35] There are, uh, kitting costs, uh, everything, everything gets taken into.

[00:15:40] Chris: There's a, I don't want Jonathan to yell at me from buying from 12 vendors costs.

[00:15:46] Brett: Yes. Yes. There's also the fact that the more, the more variables you introduce, the more likely you are to have

[00:15:55] a problem.

[00:15:56] Chris: Right. That's no, that's a great point. I didn't ever even think of that. Yeah. That's a great point. You know, you keep, you can honestly affect quality by limiting your vendors too interesting. Um, so, so Magnus, if, if, if you wouldn't mind sharing, I, I know there's, it's, it's obviously quite similar, but you know, what is it different about you and your process for ordering from CircuitHub?

[00:16:18] Magnus: So working with the CircuitHub platform cuts out a lot of the, even more tedious or more manual parts of the job. And it's absolutely a very automated,

[00:16:28] Chris: first of all, you don't have to quote.

[00:16:30] Magnus: Yeah. So CircuitHub takes care of the quoting and it outputs towards me, A pretty complete list of things I need and quantities I need, but it's not fully automated through end to end.

[00:16:42] There's a lot of manual adjustments that need to be made and computers can't think of everything or notice everything. And there's a lot of parts of that, uh, computers or the automated system tends to, uh, overestimate or underestimate or not necessarily reflect that the way that, uh, humans would handle the parts when it gets to a actual production.

[00:17:03] So everything needs to be verified sort of along the way, but, uh, when it comes to, uh, actually buying the parts and getting them here to the process as much like, uh, Brett described earlier.

[00:17:14] Chris: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. It does. At the end of the day, you know, once you know what you need to buy, the processes is probably quite similar between the two.

[00:17:24] Magnus: Yeah. All the same factors weigh in. Maybe I would add to the list of things that, uh, we take into account that, uh, Brett looked over is that business relationships are personal contacts at the vendors have a very large saying sometimes the visit decision-making and they can really support us, specially when things aren't going to plan that in a perfect world where everything's working out, we can just grow a confer to a cold, hard pricing or, or something that's easily measurable like that.

[00:17:55] But as soon as things start to get a little bit more complex, maybe we need to return things. Maybe we need to get some insight and information on lead times. That's when, uh, our personal, uh, contact with our suppliers starts to really.

[00:18:11] Chris: Yeah. And, uh, uh, uh, shout out to Brenda at Digi-Key for being just basically the greatest person ever and helping us with all our complicated problems.

[00:18:22] Magnus: Yeah. That's so valuable. So there's a lot to be said about automated platforms. So that there's do everything online, never, ever get in touch with any human on the long way. That's fine when it works, but as soon as we need to do anymore, that's when, uh, that's when it matters to we know a person

[00:18:42] Chris: yeah. Stuff breaks down and you need, you need somebody to help you with something, you know, I'm, I'm curious about what your experience has been like. This is a question for either of you, um, uh, in both of you obviously, but what have you found what you're doing? Being impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Has, has that had an impact on how you get your job done aside from the fact that you're both working from home more?

[00:19:10] Um, I know we're starting to return back to work, uh, physically, but I know, uh, you know, you guys still have the opportunity to work from home, but besides that, like from the vendor standpoint, shipping standpoint, have you seen a difference there?

[00:19:23] Magnus: So most of our vendors are US-based, but sometimes we do source things from Asia.

[00:19:28] And that's when we started to notice things, uh, going a little bit off, off the rails back in, uh, December early January lead time, starting to increase, but, uh, uh, supply chains were surprisingly resilient in my opinion. And we didn't really start to, uh, start to notice it until well until everybody else did.

[00:19:49] Once, on onse side there's the actual shipping delays, you know, how long DHL takes to ship the package from the warehouse to us. Ah, sort of the step before that, how long did our suppliers supplies last? And that goes to our manufacturing and all the way down the value chain down to resource extraction, basically everything has beenreally affected yeah.

[00:20:13] Chris: And how about you, Brett? Have you, have you seen similar or is there anything different you've noticed similar?

[00:20:19] Brett: Definitely. In addition to the shipping delays that Magnus had mentioned, um, we, we did see a lot of packages being stuck in, in Asia when moving into the United States. Um, as far as vendors, the larger, the vendor that we saw the most impact out, I think was Samtec.

[00:20:36] A lot of their orders are a lot of their part numbers are built to order and maintain very low inventory across authorized distribution. Um, so a lot of their factories in Malaysia and Singapore. For quite some time. And I believe even at the moment are subject to 34 day lead times. So if, if that part number is not available at one of their authorized distributors, um, there is quite a long lead time to be waited, uh, for, until those parts arrived here.

[00:21:09] And that has impacted, uh, impacted a couple of our, all of our Worthington direct orders and resulted in some pretty significant delays in our ability to provide finished product, uh, to some customers. Luckily they're very understanding every everyone is in the same boat, but, uh, unfortunately it does have an impact.

[00:21:30] Chris: Yeah. It's heartbreaking when you see machines not working and it's only because that connector didn't show up, they're like, we're, we're ready. We can build stuff. We just can't get the parts. Well, it's, you know, that leads right into, um, there's a few segments we want to talk about, uh, during, during this week show because we, we were talking ahead of time.

[00:21:51] Uh, w you know, what can we talk about? What would listeners be interested in? And so we're, we're going to kind of break this up into four segments and they're, and they're going to overlap with each other, obviously, but, um, we want to talk about what things do customers ask us about what are these common questions that customers ask us, and how is it that we respond?

[00:22:12] Uh, there's also, we would just want to make some recommendations, some tips, some ideas that will make the purchasing aspect of building your product easier. Uh, then we also want to talk about, I, I titled this, you should know this. So if you're ordering circuit boards, these are things you should understand, uh, and it will make your life so much easier.

[00:22:33] So w we'll get into that. That'll be a lot of fun and also a critical aspect of, of not necessarily purchasing, but, uh, it is tangentially related is consignments. So when you send us parts, how does, how does that impact things? So that that'll be a lot of fun to get. Uh, Brett sorta led right into it.

[00:22:54] Customers ask us often, why is this out of stock? W w w why can't I find this part and maybe, uh, whoever wants to take it bread or Magnus, uh, when a comment, a little bit about why customers ask us that quite or not, why do they ask us that question, but how do we respond when customers ask us? Why is that it's out of stock?

[00:23:14] Magnus: One answer to that would be on a basic level is that we can't purchase the parts at the immediate moment that the job is quoted. So when the job is quoted, we check prices and we check stock volumes. If the customer then accepts the offer a couple of days later, some parts don't have a couple of days worth of stock.

[00:23:35] So that's something that's kind of hard to deal with it. There's not a whole lot that can be done there if a part goes out of stock.

[00:23:42] Chris: But this is another question I see is customers say, you know, why, why didn't you start ordering the parts after I clicked.

[00:23:48] Magnus: Yeah. So one reason for that is, uh, for example, timezones, we work normal eight hour days for the most part while our customers are in Europe.

[00:23:57] That that means the purchasing happens at the earliest the next day. Another part of it is that, uh, CircuitHub does and Worthington as well, does do some engineering work. We do verify, uh, bill of material that we have to make sure that the parts, the boards and that takes them. It takes a human to, uh, go through a process.

[00:24:23] And that may take a few hours, may take an entire day. So that's a valuable service that, uh, we're going to answer do provide, and that needs to

[00:24:31] happen before the parts are purchased.

[00:24:33] Chris: Yeah, because you know, here here's the scenario. If we didn't do that, We find that a customer specified a QFP to, to purchase, but their board is designed for a BGA and, you know, have the same part number w you know, it's just packaged differently from TI well, that means that now we've ordered hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars of that QFP and now we've got to figure out, can we return it?

[00:25:02] Can we get refunded? Is there a restocking fee? So that's, that's, that's why we do that engineering ahead of time before we do the purchasing.

[00:25:11] Magnus: Yeah, exactly. If the problem is there, when the order is placed, it's a matter of tackling the problem earlier in the process, before it turns into a more time-consuming process involving returns and things like.

[00:25:24] Chris: Yeah. All right. So another question that gets asked is, um, why is my order held up? And, and obviously there's a number of reasons that an order might be held up, uh, aside from the purchasing process, but, uh, what can happen as far as from your end, that can cause delays in, in delivering a product to the customer.

[00:25:45] Brett: One thing that can happen and does often happen is customs clearance. We may order some parts that are shipping out of, uh, let's say for example, Newark UK, or another lens, um, branch of arrow. Um, those parts may ship that day. They may ship the next day or sometimes within three days. Uh, when we order a part at noontime, uh, you know, east coast standard time, it is not noon in the Netherlands or in Hong Kong.

[00:26:17] Um, so there's, there are shipping delays related to as Magnus said times zones. Uh, additionally, once those parts ship out of a foreign country, um, they're subject to customs clearance and we often see, uh, packages that have shipped from DHL or FedEx. Sit at the customs hub, waiting, awaiting clearance.

[00:26:41] Um, this became a bit more of a pronounced issue during the. Uh, pandemic, um, likely because there were less people actually staffing those, those customs checkpoints, but, um, that is something that is entirely out of our control. Uh, you know, sometimes we'll have customers ask us, well, can you, can you contact customs and ask them to, to move us along quicker?

[00:27:02] And, uh, unfortunately the, the, uh, government of the United States does not bend to the, to the whims of a Worthington assembly.

[00:27:11] Chris: Well, we're working on that. That's a 2021 feature. Uh, yeah, that's funny. Yeah. Any, any other reasons you guys can think of perhaps, you know, besides, uh, customs, why, why things might get held up?

[00:27:26] Brett: One other possibility is the fact that a parts all arrive that kit is complete. And in order for that to kit, to, to be completed here, our kitting team is going to open up all those boxes. They're going to verify that the part counts, they're going to verify using barcodes and scanners, that all those parts received match up to the bill of materials that's being driven in our MRP system.

[00:27:50] Uh, there is however, the very small possibility. And when you're building tens of thousands of, of boards annually, this will happen multiple times throughout the year. That the part number on that bag does not match the part that is inside of that bag. Uh, so luckily we have really fantastic pick and place equipment.

[00:28:13] That's equipped to be able to, uh, test the values of capacitors and resistors to verify that, uh, that machine is expecting 0.1 mic, uh, capacitor. That part is indeed a point one mic capacitor well happens a few times a year. The machine will go to test that first pick. And that 0.1, mic capacitor is a 10k resistor.

[00:28:36] Well, if we don't have the correct part in stock that we can pull from our inventory or at, or email a customer say, Hey, w we don't have this exact part, but we have an equivalent. If that isn't the case where then, you know, back to square one, ordering a correction part to get, you know, here the very next day.

[00:28:57] But at that point where we've lost 24 hours and, uh, in the case of this business, 24 hours can, can be the difference between on-time delivery and being late.

[00:29:05] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we could probably have a whole episode about, uh, things that cause delays that's for sure. Um, but another question that customers sometimes ask us is, uh, why.

[00:29:20] Yeah, . I ordered this from you six months ago, 12 months ago, how come it's more expensive now with what happened?

[00:29:27] Magnus: Well, prices, fluctuate on market. Our quotes have to reflect that where you are is a for-profit operation. So we can't take on all of the market fluctuations and costs a lot of times though, we do.

[00:29:43] And that happens more often than customers probably realize, especially when there's maybe hundreds of different parts on a bom or maybe a few dozen, but we may have to source them from a different vendors. There are a load of costs that, uh, the manufacturer does absorb. It's very unlikely that everything is going to stay at the same price over the course of three weeks.

[00:30:06] Prices change every day, even. Yeah.

[00:30:11] Chris: Sorry. I was just going to say it's, it's almost, you know, it's, it's almost like, um, you know, trading pork shares or something like it does it changes rapidly.

[00:30:24] Brett: Yeah. These are, these are commodities and then things like tantalum or, uh, you know, the dialectics and capacitors, you know, can become scarce at any time for any reason.

[00:30:36] This happened a couple of years ago. And when that happens, prices spike

[00:30:40] Chris: the great MLCC shortage of 2018. Yup. Yep.

[00:30:44] Brett: Where, where every common value capacitor, literally every common value capacitor became extinct over the course of the days. Uh, but then there are reasons outside of just the electronics market, uh, politics, tariffs, uh, have a huge effect on the cost of parts.

[00:31:05] Um, if you're buying a a hundred dollars microchip device, Uh, that was a hundred dollars, four years ago. Uh, that is now subject to a 25% tariff. A hundred dollars is, is, is pretty significant. Yeah. Um, and then there are also, um, things such as natural disasters, just, uh,

[00:31:26] Chris: flooding and

[00:31:26] Magnus: Taiwan a couple of years ago, that

[00:31:30] Chris: components.

[00:31:31] Yup. Crazy. Well, you know, you mentioned tariffs, Brett, and, and one of the things that we're seeing now, and, and it's really confusing, it's confusing to us. It's confusing to everybody, but maybe you can touch on like ho how tariffs get handled, how they get paid, how they get billed, all that kind of stuff.

[00:31:50] Brett: Yeah. So tariffs are one of the most misunderstood and from the perspective of our customers, probably confusing points because 99% of the time we take an order, tariffs will never be raised um, and that is part of that is because we are accounting for that in our pricing. And part of that is because as Magnus said, there is a significant amount of that that is absorbed on our end.

[00:32:23] Uh, and we do list it all on our quotes that, you know, it is up to our discretion to assess these tariffs. We do not always know what parts on your bill of materials are subject to tariffs. Um, and oftentimes the, the tariff implication is not exposed until we have bought those parts. Uh, some vendors like Mouser, you never, ever, the tariff has never exposed to you.

[00:32:50] It's, it's amortized into their unit price. You're going to buy from them and you, whatever that price listed on the website and the invoice, that's the price paid.

[00:32:59] Chris: Hmm. Interesting

[00:33:01] Brett: other vendors, uh, TTI, for example, they'll take all of those tariff costs that your account has racked up for that for the last billing cycle that month.

[00:33:13] And at the end of every month, you'll get an invoice itemized of every tariff on every PO that you gave them. Now, you don't know the tariff implications on your PO sometimes until the end of your billing cycle. And that can be problematic when you sometimes have to go back to a customer in the midst of a build and say, Hey, we ordered these parts.

[00:33:37] We have them here. We're we're we are building your boards, but, uh, there's a, there's a tariff charge of XYZ on, on this order. And, and. That'll have to be handled.

[00:33:48] Chris: Um, I I'm sure those phone calls are very comfortable.

[00:33:55] Brett: Yeah. That, that, that note on that, that note on the quotes, uh, discussing tariffs sometimes isn't, uh, isn't noticed until those phone calls.

[00:34:03] Chris: Yeah. And then sometimes, I mean, it like in circuit hubs case, um, your, a lot of times you're paying before we even get started on the order. And so to your point, Brett, sometimes we just have to decide, well, all right, we got a $300 bill here.

[00:34:19] Are we going to pass it for the tariffs? Are we going to pass this on to the customer? Or are we just going to absorb it? And, uh, it's, it's been tricky. It's been very tricky, tricky to navigate these waters. That's for sure.

[00:34:30] Brett: I will say we do. We do the best that we can to, uh, to absorb as much of that as we can.

[00:34:37] Uh, but there, there are instances where, where, uh, D the amount is just simply simply too much to be. Right.

[00:34:44] Chris: All right, so here's, here's an, oh, I'm sorry.

[00:34:47] Magnus: No, I was just going to say, if people are wondering, why don't we break out all the different tariffs upfront as part of the quote well well, you tried digging into the data sheet of all the different components

[00:34:58] Chris: Yeah, where's this being manufactured and then it says maybe China, maybe Taiwan, maybe Thailand, maybe Vietnam. And

[00:35:04] Magnus: it changed it for the same part of the manufacturer may have couple of, couple of different factories. They played games like funneling the parts through their subsidiaries to bypass tariffs.

[00:35:13] There's in many cases, literally no way to tell what the origin of country of origin for a particular part is. It's just, it's not information that's available to us as a buyer before, uh, our vendors give us a bill at the end of the month.

[00:35:29] Chris: I've, I've got a funny story about that. Actually. Um, I was researching, I was trying to onboard another PCB supplier and I was, you know, doing some, uh, you know, research before I really dug in deep and just contacted a few different shops that were recommended.

[00:35:46] And one of them I contacted and the CEO called me and we're having this conversation and he goes, well, how do you feel about how do you feel about these tariffs? And I said, well, you know, I don't like, I don't, I don't like paying them, but that's you gotta pay them. That's it's like taxes, you know, you pay him.

[00:36:03] And he goes, well, you know, I have a, I have a facility in Canada. I can just ship them to Canada and repack them and send them to you from Canada. And I said, oh, interesting. Well, um, you know, it's been nice talking to you and, uh, we'll, we'll chat later. We didn't chat later. So yeah. To your point, Magnus they do, they try to play games.

[00:36:24] There's there's, you know, some sketchy stuff out there. Um, okay. Enough about tariffs. Let's talk about another thing the customers ask us about markup what is markup? Why does markup, um, you know, what are some reasons that, that there is such a thing as well? First, let me, let me define what markup is briefly and, and effectively.

[00:36:46] It's just a, a, we take the cost of your parts. We add a percentage, uh, to that cost and we bill you for that. It's, it's a marked up fee. We, we add a certain percentage to the cost of all your parts. We don't, we don't always, um, um, I'm speaking on the Worthington side of things. We don't charge you one for one, the part, the cost of the parts as we get the, as we get the quotes back from our suppliers.

[00:37:10] So why D why is there a markup? Um, what is it used for maybe you guys could

[00:37:16] Brett: so main objective of component markup is margin, uh, It's it's obvious. It doesn't need to be stated, but, uh, we are operating a business here. Uh, there's an entire team of people here that are, that are working to assemble boards and, uh, a significant portion of the, of the margin comes from that component markup.

[00:37:41] Uh, another reason why we do that is, is, uh, secondary to that is just financial. When we go out and we buy an entire kit for, for a job, we may be spending $20,000 on parts to support that order. We may have 10 orders like that. Uh, so we may be carrying on, on our accounts, quite quite a bit of money and.

[00:38:06] Through our vendors, those accounts are due net 30. We've placed that order. That order is going to ship to us. Uh, and our vendors expect payment from, from Worthington assembly on that account within 30 days. Well, within 30 days, we may just begin starting start physically actually assembling those boards.

[00:38:26] The bare boards are going to get here in 15 days. By that point in time, you know, the parts have already been ordered that that clock is ticking. Um, we're going to build those boards where you're going to, to ship finished assemblies to our customer, and then they are going to pay their bill in 30 days.

[00:38:43] Right? Yeah. But at the time that, by the time that is all happened, we've already, you know, gone out and paid the bill for the original, uh, for the original order. So there's a degree of it is simply, uh, the cost it takes to actually carry a credit line and, and, uh, Acquire this many parts at the volumes that we are working.

[00:39:07] Chris: Yeah. And even if you didn't have a line of credit that you were paying interest on, that means you're tying up a quarter million dollars on money, money that you could be making interest on. So yes. So at the end of the day, you know, money costs money.

[00:39:23] Brett: You know, if, if, if everything Worthington assembly bought was paid for in cash, when we bought it, um, there would be a lot that, that couldn't get done machines that couldn't get bought, um, you know, process improvements that couldn't get made.

[00:39:38] Chris: And for more on this listen to NPRs planet, money podcast, all about economics and how the world works. So great. Yeah. So markup exists and, uh, I, I've never heard of a single customer having a problem with it. It's just, it's an understanding that, that that's, that's how you have to operate a business. It's like, it's like complaining to Costco that, you know, they charge more for their products than they buy.

[00:40:03] It's like, well, how do you, how do you think they make money? Yeah. All right. So next big topic recommendations. This is, this can be a short one, uh, you know, or it can, who knows it can go longer, but we had, uh, we had some ideas on things we can recommend to customers to, to make their lives easier. Um, and, and so what, what are some recommendations we can give to customers?

[00:40:31] Brett, you brought up a point the other day about buying, buying connectors and, and how, you know, in the design phase almost, uh, how can you choose who, who your connector supplier might be?

[00:40:43] Right. So, uh, one recommendation is if, if possible, and now I understand that there are some manufacturers that make specialty parts, and there are some applications that require.

[00:40:55] Certain parts made by certain, uh, manufacturers. But in general, one recommendation that we try to make is to use parts that are widely available in the supply chain. Um, Samtec is a great vendor. They're great manufacturer. They make great connectors. We have no, no complaints about their quality, but sometimes their parts are not widely available.

[00:41:16] Uh, and in the case of, let's say a four pin header with, you know, 10th inch pitch. Do you really need that fancy Samtec connector. That's got a two week lead time, or might that be able to, uh, be swapped out for, uh, an equivalent Harwin or Sullins connector, um, that there might be millions of available immediately and we could, we could get in here tomorrow.

[00:41:43] Yeah. So that's one recommendation that.

[00:41:47] Mm. So does that mean, like, does that mean that they have to, you know, in the design phase is they should be choosing parts that Sullins makes, or are you saying that Sullins or Harwin at that, that they can make a part that's similar to Samtec?

[00:42:04] Brett: In some cases there are applications that only Samtec will be able to support.

[00:42:10] For example, they make some really fancy, a sea Ray connectors that almost have a BGA footprint. You're not going to find that from any other manufacturer. Um, but if during your design process, when you're generating your bill of materials, if you, if you are looking for a part and you can't find it, or if you see, Hey, these are kind of low stock.

[00:42:33] And when I go to the site, you know, there's a lead time that applies. If they run out at that point, it, it might be good to, instead of choosing that. Kind of hard to find part, just go in and either list an alternate part and equivalent that, Hey, when I send this bill of materials off to Worthington to quote, if they can't find part a at that I've specked at J two.

[00:42:57] Well, okay, well in the bomb, I've already included a line J two alternate, and here's a, here's an equivalent part do that, uh, that that's really helpful for us. It, it cuts down on the amount of, uh, back and forth communication. If you've provided an alternate that we can go ahead and use it. You've already approved that we don't have to go ahead and, uh, put the, put the legwork in, uh, to, to locate an alternate for you or send you an email asking for some, some help in doing that.

[00:43:23] Chris: Yeah. And so that's, I think it's obvious that you can cross a lot of capacitors, a lot of resistors, but there's other parts. Um, the Mo most diodes can be crossed. Most LEDs can be crossed. I mean, obviously if you're making a, using a high power Cree led or something, you're not going to cross that. But if it's just an indicator, led chances are, there's an alternative that will work and having more than one, um, will be great.

[00:43:50] So we do get, like, we do sometimes see customers give us multiple caps and resistors, but we don't often see multiple LEDs and diodes and connectors, but there's really no reason they can't. I mean, there there's alternatives for a lot of these commodity parts.

[00:44:04] Melissa: Yeah. And speaking from CircuitHub, you actually can just specify any alternatives right in our BOM. That really saves time when people do that

[00:44:14] Chris: , and, and it's not only does it save time, but the computer does some fancy stuff with that too. So like, uh, if you're, if, if you have three different LEDs and. Well, first of all, it's going to make sure that all of those LEDs are available, but then it's going to say, well, what's the least expensive one I'm going to, I'm going to make that sorta my canonical led that I tell, uh, Magnus to go out and buy.

[00:44:39] Yeah. All right. Well, how about

[00:44:43] Magnus: I just keeping in mind, the life cycles is also important. So there may be stock of a discontinued product right now, or what about in six months? If the product is no longer being manufactured, stock is going to run out sooner or later. So you might as well go with, uh, the replacement that the manufacturer may be transitioning to a new product family that has the same specifications.

[00:45:05] So why not do that from the beginning.

[00:45:07] Chris: Yeah, exactly. Make sure it's still an active part, not an obsolete part. You guys were mentioning the other day, how, um, you'll get a bill of materials, brand new bill of materials just generated, you know, yesterday with 16 obsolete part numbers.

[00:45:25] Brett: Yeah, it will be, uh, you can tell sometimes when we'll be sent data and it be an Altium export with timestamps and parts that are bill of materials just generated yesterday.

[00:45:36] And for whatever reason, the capacitor and the designers, a component library was EOL three years ago. So just keeping, keeping, keeping those up to date. We do generally for Worthington customers kind of as a part of our quoting service, uh, where we can specify alternatives for, for any obsolete, uh, parts or parts that we can't find or parts with very high MOQ.

[00:46:02] Um, you know, there are, there are some, some part numbers that are only available in 10,000 piece reels. And, you know, if you need 10 of something, uh, we're going to do the best we can to try to find a suitable alternative that, that, uh, we don't have to buy full reels of.

[00:46:19] Melissa: Yeah. I think a lot of these things say maybe take more time in the design phase, but they're really just ultimately end up saving you time and money long-term

[00:46:30] Chris: yeah, it may, it may cost you a couple hours in the design phase, but it will save you days, maybe weeks in the manufacturing phase, small, small decisions early on can have a major impact to later on.

[00:46:44] And that's true for life and that's true for electronics manufacturing. Um, uh, all right. How about buying from hobbyists? Uh, you know, recommending parts from hobbyists websites?

[00:46:57] Magnus: So this is not a hobbyist operation. We have big machines, robots that need the parts in a particular format or a particular carrier tape prototyping.

[00:47:07] That's uh, maybe a designer sitting at home, whereas work bench working on, on a one piece. Maybe you can now pick up the parts with tweezers and put it under a microscope, a hand place in parts, but that's not going to scale. Yeah, same goes for the packaging or the parts go into out. There's there's a lot that we have to do.

[00:47:30] Uh, think of the consideration when it comes to our sourcing for a professionally produced products.

[00:47:37] Chris: I can give you a perfect example. Magnus. I I've been working on this little hobby project and I've been buying parts from, from Adafruit and Sparkfun and, and those guys are awesome. They, they have some really unique and cool products and they, you know, they may import something from China that you can't buy from the United States.

[00:47:57] And then they put it on a dummy board, so I can solder it into my breadboard and, and, um, it's really, really cool. Um, but, uh, if it does not scale, I I've, I've looked into some of my hobby projects and finding a way, oh, how could I, um, all right, let's see here. How could I, how could I turn this into a product and then, and then hire a Worthington assembly to build it.

[00:48:20] Um, and I'm finding that those parts either are only supplied by Adafruit or Sparkfun, uh, because it's not the kind of part that's regularly imported into the United States through typical supply channels. And more importantly, if I was to buy it from them, uh, it would come individually wrapped in a little shielded bag.

[00:48:43] And, uh, so I went down this rabbit hole of, okay, then I'll just take the chips and I'll just put the chips on a circuit board rather than the modules that they're buying. And I'm finding that the modules are, or the individual chips are more expensive than the modules themselves. And so it ends up being, you know, the parts cost are more expensive, but then the manufacturing is far less expensive because it can be built by machines and not by hand.

[00:49:07] Yeah.

[00:49:08] Brett: The Sparkfun and Adafruit, uh, ESP wifi modules are huge offenders that we see here.

[00:49:16] Chris: Those are the ones that I'm thinking of

[00:49:19] Brett: because people, people design with them. They really liked them. They're a low cost solution to be able to integrate. you know wifi or Bluetooth into your, into your IOT product.

[00:49:27] And they're great when you're building something like you said by hand, they're fantastic. But, uh, when you need 500 of something built and these single pillow packed wifi modules show up here and, uh, you know, the, the folks who are running these machines who are expecting large pieces of cut tape or a real that they can load into a feeder or get onto a magazine, just let that machine run.

[00:49:55] All of a sudden, the wheels fall off of that process. And you've got. Literally a person with a tweezers peeling, the cellophane off one by one, pulling them out with tweezers, you know, or an hand placing them. And that, that, that is, uh, that's how you end up, uh, incurring delays on your order,

[00:50:16] Chris: a million dollar assembly line watching a person

[00:50:20] Brett: painful.

[00:50:21] Chris: Um, now that's not to say that you can't specify those cool modules, but usually, um, what, what we've done in the past with customers is we encourage them to, uh, buy those parts themselves buy a reel of those parts of themselves, import it themselves and supply it to us and believe it or not, that's actually a little bit easier to do as a consumer than it is as a business.

[00:50:46] Um, you know, there's just more avenues that you can do and you can pull that in and then you can send that to us. You know, and we can, we can build with that. So now it's on a reel, it's taping reel or it's in a tray, you know, it's in some format that we can feed a pick and place machine. Yeah. So avoid, avoid recommending that we source parts from Adafruit and Sparkfun.

[00:51:07] That's that's a good tip. Or how about, um, uh, Magnus? You had an interesting story about a customer who recommended it. I mean, ultimately it turned into a scam, right? Yeah.

[00:51:21] Magnus: Very impressive uS-based company was looking for an obscure parts and I was a good engineer that went there looking for a particular part.

[00:51:31] Then he found a very nice looking website. Well, I had told them that we could not locate this part from a reputable source or a authorized vendor, but you found this very slick looking website that had all of the little, uh, security logos you were expecting. And it looked like a legitimate distributor, but it turned out to be a complete scam and a simple Google search, your little, lots of results of people getting, getting burnt there. So there is a reason why we go through, uh, authorized distributors. Manufacturers also have authorized distributors where reason to prevent this kind of thing. So be very careful with you. Uh, well, I don't want to name specific countries that are more guilty than others, of, of, uh, being the source of these types of scams.

[00:52:19] Chris: Did you ultimately get scammed or did you guys detect it before it happened?

[00:52:23] Magnus: We did not get scammed. I think our, our customer was sort of halfway through the payment process when he pulled the plug, realized that something was up. But, uh, if you haven't heard of a vendor before just Google them and you might find some bad reviews and that's probably a good, good idea.

[00:52:43] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Great point. I mean, the truth is, um, w w why were they going to this scam site? Well, because it was out of stock and sometimes we get customers that ask us, Hey, can you find any of these parts? And it's like, well, if it's out of stock for you, it's, it's probably out of stock for us.

[00:53:02] Melissa: We don't have access to just this magical secret supply chain that everyone else doesn't. Right.

[00:53:09] Magnus: Yeah. And we do get all the questions. Why don't you buy it from eBay? I saw this part listed on Amazon, and that's a whole can of worms that surprising, that even has to be explained because you cannot track anything nor guarantee anything before you buy it in those cases. And it's honestly more likely to be some sort of a scam or not that being said, if a customer wants to go ahead and try it and then verify that the parts are correct themselves before they ship them to.

[00:53:42] That's fine. That's that's the, the customer, assuming the responsibility there and, and doing the verifications and that's, that's fine with us.

[00:53:51] Chris: Yeah. And, uh, counterfeit parts are real. That's a real thing. And if you want to see some disturbingly, dehumanizing pictures, Google counterfeit parts to see children over open fires, removing parts from old Dell motherboards and scratching the markings off of them and reselling them as legitimate parts.

[00:54:13] It's it's it happens. It's real.

[00:54:16] Magnus: It's a real industry,

[00:54:17] Brett: counterfeit parts, I mean, parks that have laser markings that don't equate to what the actual part inside is, uh, that those are real possibilities, but also you might get in the, in the case of, let's say terminal blocks or some, some connectors, you might get parts that look fine.

[00:54:35] And they'll make it all the way through our process and we'll go to run them on our selective soldering machine and the part, you know, they, the plastic might not actually be a thermal grade plastic that's designed to withstand, you know, the superheated nitrogen that is being pumped to shield the solder head.

[00:54:58] That's going to get those parts very hot. And if they're not designed for that, they're going to melt into little black puddles of plastic on your circuit board. Yep. And that's, that is the worst case scenario, but it can happen. Uh, other times the plastic might be fine, but the, the leads or the, the flashing may have been contaminated.

[00:55:19] And we can try, we can try to flux those pins all day long and solder just will not wet to them. Uh, we've seen that as well. Um, you get, you can get corroded and oxidized leads on, on parts. Not only through whole part surface, mal parts can have corroded leads, uh, from, from some of these places. And it's, it's all bad for process.

[00:55:42] It's all bad for quality and, and that's, that's why we try best. We can, um, to stay within the, the authorized distribution chain.

[00:55:51] Magnus: Yeah, you can't determine the age of a part that's coming in. What batch it's from. It may affect the performance of the part

[00:55:58] like LEDs are a classic example of parts that are, in some cases, very lot dependent color hues do change as technology progresses and a ten-year-old led may not have the same color hue as one that was produced last week. So if you're buying from an unknown batch, from something that's sitting on the shelf for who knows how long, the part may have very different performance characteristics, then you might expect

[00:56:26] Chris: Magnus. Were you aware that we had this exact scenario recently? I think even this week or maybe the end of last week.

[00:56:33] Magnus: So I've been working from home. So I haven't heard all the stories

[00:56:36] Chris: Yeah. So, um, uh, our SMT team contacted me and said, Hey.

[00:56:44] Uh, customer sent us a reel of LEDs. The date code on it is 2003 and the paper is brown and the plastic is ripping off and I'm like, I would not use those. And so we reached out to the customer and, and before we went and built them and the customer said, yeah, you know, it's just an indicator led, it goes into a box it's, it's fine.

[00:57:09] You know, just has to light up and if they light up after reflow, we're good. And that turns out they were good. 17 year old LEDs. I was pretty shocked,

[00:57:17] Magnus: But well, we can't assume thatso good thing you asked,

[00:57:20] Chris: so, yeah, exactly. W when in doubt, we, okay. Speaking of asking, uh, that's another recommendation we have for customers. Uh, ask us, ask us how it went, ask us if there's anything that could be different that could improve the purchasing process.

[00:57:39] Um, you know, have you guys had an experience where a customer has come to you and said, uh, Hey, how did, how did it go? Is there anything I can change on my end? And, and you had a good result.

[00:57:49] Magnus: So, when we're working with customers that are in the early prototyping stage, maybe the first day order, five boards, maybe 50 boards after that a hundred boards, after that, they may get away with using unicorn parts that are hard to source.

[00:58:04] Maybe we can get 10 pieces of something, maybe even 500 pieces of something, but if they really want to scale up, they might want to switch to. Maybe more mainstream parts or some equivalent that, uh, is going to scale better. So, so that's something that we deal with fairly often just because of the type of, uh,

[00:58:24] Chris: yeah. And so having that conversation can be huge just to just, you know, and it doesn't have to take long. It can just be five minutes. Oh yeah. You know, um, uh, we built 200 of these for you. There was actually only 204 of this pressure sensor available. So you may want to consider, you know, just, and without having a conversation, they would never know because we would go, oh, Hey, we have what we need.

[00:58:47] We buy it. We move on. We live with, think about it again. But if the customer asks us, then, then we can give them a heads up and warn them that they may have trouble with this in the future.

[00:58:55] Magnus: Yeah, exactly.

[00:58:56] Chris: That's awesome. Uh, I think it's very likely that we're, we're going to have to break up this show into two episodes.

[00:59:03] Otherwise it's going to turn into a, uh, a very, very. Very very long episode, because there's so much more we can still talk about. Um, so if you, uh, uh, have enjoyed what you're hearing here and you want to hear some more than, uh, be sure to tune in next week or next two weeks, cause we release every two weeks and you'll hear the second half of the show.

[00:59:26] As we talk about, uh, things we really wish customers knew and things that we feel like if they knew ahead of time would make their lives so much easier would make our lives so much easier. And, uh, also we'll get into the whole subject of consignment, sending parts to the factory and, uh, how that has an impact.

[00:59:47] on how we can deliver a product to you, uh, what the quality, all of these sorts of things. So, uh, if those topics interest, you be sure to, uh, come back next week and we'll, we'll cover that.

[01:00:01] Melissa: So thanks for listening to the pig place podcast. If you like, what you heard, please consider subscribing in your favorite podcast app and leave us a review

[01:00:10] Brett: on

[01:00:10] Melissa: apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from. .

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