What could I do for my company?

[Miles Teg]

Hello everyone daring to enter in this topic.

I’ve got a strange request for you. Would you share your experience and advice to help me do my best for “my career” and for the good of the company I belong too?


My main concern is: How to work with this company with my skills and willing to design system, electronics and PCB?

How to create things by ourselves, my 2 software colleagues and me. And not just writing specs, explaining them to a foreign country factory and make validation/debugging of their work.
When my company really wants to make good innovations and I know this is true as the designers team manage to brainstorm-study-prototype-industrialize 2 simple and nice products around cookware.
And this company not against to see out R&D team growing.


So I enter this company 3 years ago.
More than 100 employees devoted to sourcing a very large array of products for the shops of our sisters companies. Hoven, washing machine, TV, smartphone, audio stuff… Mainly selected in Chinese or European factories, tested in our labs, modifications requested, check of respect for European regulations. They do it well and have good sales and financial result.
This company do this historical job well and have a good living of it.
I have good pay, nice ambiance and working place.

But it remains really frustrating for an electronic engineer willing to create!
You know? The schematic/layout/PCB/Software thing and get the pleasure to see this running on a sell product.
Or maybe just creating testing device for the lab. I don’t know, but spitting out f***ing PCB! Because this is what I want to do, continuous learning, continuous challenge, creating electronic.


Summer 2015 we manage to create and produce a BT speaker.
Not a bad product. With a good respect of our guideline to give access to consumer of functionalities and quality, cheaper than with an A brand.

But this project was more like an exception. Like we have been pushing really hard against internal advices and habits.

This project was also a good opportunity to show the interest of owning our own schematic/layout/source code.
Giving possibility of a seamless line of products and to change production factory if any problem with it occurred.
But no… this project remains an exception.


Currently 3-4 different devices have or are currently going out of production with a stronger involvement of the company and our designers. But no place for our DEV team.
I’m sure these products will succeed, and that’s good for our company, but since I’m literally mission-less.

So since November 2015 I pushed my software teammate to go to the Linux way in order to get cheaper device with more functionalities and control on our products. I could do the PCB, he could do the BSP and we had identified 3rd parts software provider that could deliver source codes for some key interesting functions.

I was seeing this for our customers as a cheap access to Sonos like products, but for a different market and with other functions to differentiate from usual brands. (and knowing we cannot frontaly fight companies with years of experience and millions of bugdet spent)

And few months later, we had our prototype running. I had my first Cortex A with its DDR3 layout done and working, flash, Ethernet for the dev and the other peripherals. BSP was a hard part but we got good progress.

Why not a System on Module? The device form factor is too small to use such existing module and we often cannot get enough flexibility on the module pinout for the peripherals we wanted to use.

During the last months I made also proposal to switch on agile project management (soft and HW) to work more closely with the products leader and get more exchange with them in the usual agile way.
But… we don’t have real project management in the company. Just a process to make good sourcing.

So with our prototype we show a technical way for our company and provide estimation of the workforce needed to have a first full product running and port this architecture on other devices.

Result: we struggle a long time before getting a negative answer from our management. 

This was last week, and now I just don’t know what to do in there.

The only feedback I get is more on be on a process like Brainstorm, get new idea, feed the specs, make a factory work on it.
They told me I will continue to do electronic, but I don’t understand where I will create PCB by myself.

Other trail should be to be on the prototype side only. Help our designers to build Proof of Concept device in fast sprint. But I’m not even sure to do more than welding ESP8266 on Arduino with some buttons then feed the specs, go to factory…


Here we are. Sorry for this long story.

What will you do in my place? To make last attempts to be constructive for the good of the company and continue my passion duty of building electronics.
Like a last chance before leaving this company in few months.

Some new managers have arrived and they come from a bigger company that manage to make this switch from total sourcing to a large amount of self R&D and even in house/in the country factory, but for mechanic products. But seems quite long to get feedback from them and get an understanding of the electronic job.

Hoping to read you. Sincerely.

[CM800]

It's great to hear you've got that far even! I'm still trying to push to get the right software brought and begin moving on things! 

[Tomorokoshi]

Just a process to make good sourcing.

In some places, let's say a factory although software would also work, "jobs" are sent out to the lowest bidder. Those who seek that work could also be internal producers. For instance, a company that needs sheet metal parts that also has a sheet metal shop might get both internal and external quotes for the production of the part. Internal pricing might depend on the forecast for the workload in that area.

If they are good at sourcing, is there a way to position the project as if your team was an "external" supplier?

[Miles Teg]

Yes, interesting idea of internal sourcing.

But for the moment we cannot provide the same product as they are buying.
They get finished products.
As we (R&D) are fabless and without even purchase service, we cannot provide finished mass produced devices. (not even talking about plastic casing we cannot draw in house)

Instead, we could make proposal of selling blueprint of a device (PCB layout, and software).
But for such complicated devices, and so restricted BOM price (consumer market...) we cannot do without a partnership of a factory providing support for critical components purchase and adjust our design to real and possible production capabilities. For example we start prototype in Freescale i.MX, but for cost issue, we should certainly move to asian processors brands.

And finally we are not staffed enough, no enough software dev (no budget for outsource neither).

No, as  we cannot convince our management to invest on product we are starting to devellop, we cannot frontally fight external sources.

For now our best idea should be to build a better method (startup storytelling style) to sell ideas internally prototyped. But I'm not sure to still able to build electronic this way.