Stephen Luft
Lifetime Supporting Member
SNK said:
Good for you, I commend you on your personal decisions.
What about your business decisions? If you had a choice between a product manufactured in either Canada or the US, and one from China (or overseas)...and the Chinese product was 15% less expensive, which would your company choose?
My point was that the manufacturing jobs are affected by the decisions made, by engineers, contractors, purchasing agents...etc.
Is the best product always the least expensive product?
Do people factor in the hidden costs associated with manufacturing, such as support, warranty, economies of scale?
My money is where my mouth is. Our web site states it.
We have two board houses in the Toronto area that fabricate our raw circuit boards.
We don't have a great deal of control over the components (ICs, caps, resistors, etc...) in that the vast majority are not manufactured in this country but in fabs outside of North America.
Every controller we sell is manufactured and tested here. We have no other manufacturing facility.
Regarding the use of outside contractors, we have used them in the past and will likely continue to use them when the circumstances arise.
This is my point exactly, regardless of the circumstances, whether the issue is from the perspective of the contractor or the contractee, you as the contractee don't have control over the contractor. The contractor has to be responsible for himself, because every decision he makes affects him directly.
We have acted as a contractor for the very reasons stated above, our customer either doesn't have the time, the manpower, or the knowledge to develop the portion of their application that relates to our products.
There is so much global competition that there is little room for under utilized overhead.
I have noticed this environment for about the last 10 years. Companies will either:
1. Make do with what they have
2. Cross train employees, so that they know other aspects of the business
3. Hire an independent contractor
Before they even consider hiring another employee.
You now have on top of everything else a very uncertain economy, whereby for some, business couldn't be better, while for others, it is very sketchy. The last thing employers want to do is hire someone with no certainty that the work will be there for them next month.
I have talked with engineers that do production if they don't have any current projects open. I have seen engineers do purchasing and sales. On the flip side, I have dealt with mechanical engineers who were made responsible for doing the electrical engineering.
Needless to say, due to the competition as well as other factors, companies are only going to hire if they absolutely have to hire.
Don't get me wrong, there are people that are quite capable of mutitasking, while there are others that have no business doing more than what they were hired to do. It all rests on the individual.
My engineer came out of ITT, and was well versed in computers but not much else when we hired him. The reason we hired him was because of his computer background. He had minimal PLC knowledge, for which we trained him for what he needed to know. After his nearly 10 years here, he will now be getting in to circuit design for which he has tinkered with in his spare time. Based on his growth and desire to learn, I believe him to be fully capable for undertaking the task.
If the person has a desire to learn, and is fully capable, why not encourage your employee to grow and expand their knowledge, skills and capabilities. Yes there will likely be a learning curve. Yes there may be mistakes along the way. But, this is how we all truly learn.
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