It Is EPEMS And Not EMS That Will Ensure ‘Make In India' Succeeds

As more young entrepreneurs jump into the startup arena, many are getting their fingers burnt, with products failing in the market. A veteran from the industry, Srinivasa Moorthy S.A. highlights the reasons behind this. He advocates the electronics product engineering and manufacturing services (EPEMS) approach, rather than the EMS (electronics manufacturing services) route. Read on to learn more…

- Srinivasa Moorthy S.A.

In my career, I have developed many products in areas ranging from telecom to avionics, and all of them have been manufactured successfully. However, in the last few years, in the course of my interactions with startups and SMEs, I have seen none of them really know what it takes to manufacture a reliable product, and sometimes even seem unclear about what it takes to design one. Having been involved in helping a dozen startups in hardware design and manufacturing, I saw most of them fail when they first went into the market --most of them come to me after they are hit by the first failure. A common problem I see is that they rush to the market because the first customer wants a trial or the first revenue opportunity presented itself, even if the design was not ready for real-life deployment.

The products develop all kinds of problems once deployed, due to which the customer is disillusioned. Having worked with many startups, I noticed that some of the problems were related to the lack of product engineering. These firms take their products to an EMS vendor, which is most often basically an assembly house with a purchase department— product engineering is totally missing. What I call engineering is, for instance, designing your PCBs with proper DFX (designing for all desirable attributes, i.e., for manufacturability, assembly, inspection, test and X) inputs, and having a manufacturing test strategy in place along with calibration. Unfortunately, improper release mechanisms of software and hardware versions further complicate the existing problems.