Assuming your Design Record exists (it should!), do you own it?
This seems like a pretty easy question to answer, but I’ve found that it’s not often clear, especially in an early stage product business.
When you’re still young, you’re doing whatever it takes to keep the business alive long enough to become stable. Often, this means working with partner companies, either for design, engineering, manufacturing, or something else that isn’t part of your core business.
Let’s say we need a circuit board designed to fit in our cool new device. We’ve defined the schematic internally, and have a rough Bill of Materials defined. We don’t want to produce the boards ourselves, so we go find a PCB fab shop to manufacture a small run of 100 boards. They quote the project, we agree, and get started.
Our schematic describes the function of the board, but doesn’t describe a physical PCB, so our partner translates our schematic and BOM into a manufacturable board design. They do the work, we approve the design, and then they produce our prototype or production run.
In the end, we get 100 PCBs, which is exactly what we asked for, great!
If that’s the end of the story, then there’s no need for this post.
Far too often though, time passes, and now we want to do a design update before launching into full volume production. In order to revise the design, we change the schematic, then change the board design.
Except we can’t change the board design because our partner did it as part of the production run, and it wasn’t part of the deliverable package. All we asked for was the boards, so that’s all we got!
Now, we’re stuck using the same vendor for our larger volume production run (this may be just fine, but often isn’t), or redoing the PCB design ourselves.
The point I’m trying to make isn’t that decisions like this are always wrong, it’s that they’re often not decisions at all!
We just wanted 100 PCBs, but didn’t account for the design work we were having our partner perform. Looking back, it might have made more sense to pay a bit more money upfront in order to own the design at the end.
Either way, let’s make sure we know when decisions are being made about Design Record ownership. They’re sneaky, but important!
-Brian Schoolcraft