How to Select EMS Provider?

With internet high and quick penetration to traditional manufacturing industries, it’s becoming easier to complete international purchasing. However, enough provider options make our purchase decision waste a lot of time and hard to finalize. Purchase managers always complain that the selected provider is out of expectations despite big efforts and costs. So, how to select our EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Service) provider?

Before an answer to this question, we have to understand a basic concept of cooperation. Long good cooperation is built on counterpart term, which includes enterprise size, manufacturing capabilities, services level and perspectives. Therefore, the provider selected by purchase manager at first might not be matched with project requirements, because there are big bugs of evaluation metrics of EMS providers. Now please go through some methods below.

Online Brand Awareness

You can catch up with rich information through EMS provider website and its social media pages. It’s hard to imagine that an EMS provider who has no official website or no related results on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In can offer you outstanding exporting services, and so does provider owning bad website (pure template, without any design thoughts and updates). Here are some evaluation terms.

1. Aesthetics design of website

2. Daily or weekly update of website

3. Brand clues or reports on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In

4. Any released video on YouTube.

Manufacturing Capabilities

It is supposed to view PCB manufacturing capabilities and PCB assembly capabilities of EMS provider on website. If the related info did not display on website, we could judge that this provider really ignored customer concerns. The sign of massive duplicate or contradictory content on website is also evidence for evaluating the provider manufacturing capabilities.

Quote Analysis

Never kill a potential good provider because of the initial quote, even 50% higher than your target, because providers quoted on basis of limited conditions and 100% unclear market positioning of your product, manufacturing process details and test plan. It actually exists that provider quoted higher thought about these requirements. But provider quoted low only aimed to earn regardless of product quality at first. Normally the initial quote is based on small batch order or sample order, so it is reasonable to see big price discrepancy.

Quality Control

Professional EMS provider places column of quality control on website, which includes metrics of manufacturing process and internal management. We can evaluate the provider on this base.

Approved Certificates

Provider with certificates such as UL, CE, RoHS, TS16949, ISO9001 is likely to fulfill quality and stability of PCB manufacturing and assembly services.

Professional Sales Man

You can recognize if you are facing a professional sales man during a short call by aspects such as fluent English, sophisticated business knowledge, good communication. This is another metric to evaluate EMS capabilities and experiences of the provider.

B2B platform is gradually coming to phase of scale returns. Enterprises who like to spend money on B2B platform can earn good rank in search results. Rather, Google, Yahoo and Bing are more likely to be trusted, because of sophisticated algorithms. Good rank company tend to have advanced manufacturing capabilities and outstanding services. So please carefully filter the search results of first 3 pages and handle above evaluation metrics. Good Luck.

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