Italian Industrial Electronics Manufacturer: Supplier Consolidation — SMT Yield from 84% to 98.5%
Challenge
A company near Milan designs and manufactures servo drives, stepper motor controllers, and industrial communication gateways. Customers across Europe: packaging and textile machinery, CNC machine tools. Annual output: ~150,000 devices. For decades, they used a "distributed local outsourcing" model: PCBs — a factory in Bologna, SMT — a shop in Milan, DIP and final assembly — a third company. At a few thousand units per year, this sort of worked. At 150,000 — the problems snowballed. (1) Conflicting quality standards: the PCB factory shipped to IPC-A-600 Class 2, but the SMT shop needed Class 3 pad planarity for acceptable BGA yields. The standards conflict led to ~8% of PCBs rejected after SMT. Suppliers blamed each other. (2) Lead time black hole: each of the three suppliers had their own scheduling. A constant waiting chain: "PCBs arrived — no SMT slot. PCBA ready — no assembly slot." Average door-to-door lead time: 12 weeks. (3) SMT quality itself: the Milan shop ran on 2010-era equipment. Accuracy was barely sufficient for 0.5mm pitch QFN. The new servo drive line featured 0.4mm BGA and 0201 decoupling capacitors. The old equipment couldn't cope. SMT FPY: 84%. That meant 16 out of every 100 boards required some kind of rework. And rework itself was a new source of risk. The CEO calculated: supply chain inefficiency and quality issues cost at least €350,000 per year.
Solution
qisourcing proposed a complete "vertical production integration + unified quality system" solution. Step 1: all three supplier functions consolidated into qisourcing's unified system: PCB fabrication (8 layers, ENIG, impedance ±5%) → SMT (Siemens X4S, ±22µm accuracy, 0201 and 0.3mm BGA with ease) → DIP → final assembly (including CNC enclosures and harnesses) → FCT testing. The entire chain under one production management system. Step 2: unified IPC-A-610 Class 3 quality standard at every stage. Critical items (BGA, high-current connectors, MOSFET thermal pads) — 100% X-Ray + infrared thermography. Step 3: proactive DFM analysis. qisourcing's NPI engineers reviewed the new servo drive line layout and discovered that 0201 decoupling capacitors were located 8mm from BGA pins against a recommended ≤3mm. Decoupling effectiveness was questionable. On qisourcing's recommendation, capacitors were relocated to the back side of the board directly beneath the BGA with direct trace routing to pads — both electrical performance improved and SMT bridging risk reduced. Step 4: custom FCT fixtures. qisourcing developed test jigs for all models, simulating real motor loads (with braking resistor and encoder feedback). Every drive undergoes a 15-minute full-load test before shipment (three cycles: 0% → 100% → 0% of rated current). Functional defects eliminated. Step 5: real-time online production monitoring. The Italian team can see batch status on the line, SPI/AOI/X-Ray pass-through, and FCT results at any moment. Complete transparency.
Key Results
We have a saying in Milan: "The supply chain is the Achilles' heel of Italian industry." Our design and brand are world-class. But as soon as it comes to series production — the supply chain slows everything down. With three suppliers, we were playing an endless game with no winner: the PCB factory blames SMT, SMT blames PCB, and the assembler blames both. When we switched to qisourcing, for the first time someone saw both PCB production data and SMT assembly data simultaneously. The BGA cold joint problem is now prevented at the entry point, not caught at the exit. SMT FPY from 84% to 98.5% — that's tens of thousands of boards per year that no longer need rework. For the team, that's an enormous change — both in efficiency and simply in morale. And their FCT fixtures... Our own test engineer, after looking at the drawings, said: "Their load simulation test bench is better than what we have in our lab."
— COO, Milan
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