One reason I write these posts is to share what happens in the day-to-day life of running a PCB consulting and manufacturing business. My thought is that anyone working on a PCB design or preparing for production can see what happens on the other side of the wall and make better decisions because of it.
Today was a normal day until, for some unknown reason, I paused while clearing out my inbox to review an email exchange between my team and a customer who was preparing to make a payment.
The board was just a bunch of female headers, a few chips and some passives, but the board cost looked unusually high. After a quick glance, I knew exactly where the problem was.
Female headers (and to some extent male headers too) are notorious for driving up BOM costs. These parts can vary wildly in price depending on the exact part number you choose. The image above is a real example.
In this case, the customer was about to order 400 boards with three different female headers on the design and multiple placements of each. So, I searched the part numbers on DigiKey and found several suitable alternatives at a fraction of the cost.
I jumped into the email chain and suggested a quick call. We agreed to swap the connectors, and the change saved the customer $5,500 on the order.
That’s crazy.
To be fair, I’m not thrilled that we didn’t catch this during the quoting stage, and I’ll admit that’s not ideal. I caught it right before payment was made. However, there are additional BOM review steps later in the process, after payment is made, where one of the steps is to sort the BOM by highest cost and take a second look at the top 10 most expensive components. We likely would have caught it there.
So here’s the takeaway: watch out for headers. It’s worth spending a few extra minutes on DigiKey comparing options.
And one more thing. For male pins especially, if you have an odd number of pins -say 17 pins in a single row – ordering exactly 17 can sometimes be surprisingly expensive. In many cases, you can buy a standard 20-pin header and simply cut off the last 3 pins for a fraction of the cost.
We don’t even charge extra for little adjustments like that at Henway. That’s fine. I just hate seeing money get wasted.