Every EMS company costs assembly labor and machine time in its own way. It's usually manual, tedious and bottlenecked to the experts who know the Excel. This article explains the problem the Manufacturing module solves and why it's worth solving.
The problem: a spreadsheet that no-one really understands
If you ask ten EMS companies how they cost the time and effort to build a board and you'll get ten different answers. Often, it's a multi-tab Excel sheet that only a handful of people (often just one person) truly understand. That sheet is:
Fragile — a single-person dependency. If they're out, quoting stalls.
Disconnected — it lives apart from documentation processing, material sourcing and the rest of the quoting workflow.
Slow and error-prone — every quote is hand-assembled.
Why it's worth fixing: it's about a third of the price
For a typical PCBA, the added value — direct manufacturing cost, factory and company overhead, and profit — is roughly one third of the sales price. The rest is the direct cost of components and materials.
That one-third slice is big enough that getting it right and fast truly moves both margin and win rate.
What the module gives you
A standardized, faster, more precise way to quote manufacturing than a spreadsheet.
Manufacturing is directly connected to design and sourcing, and via Calculations, it embeds the final sales calculations, as well as quotation and internal report generation into a seamless, end-to-end workflow.
It's standardized, consistent and reliable across everyone who partakes in quoting and costing.
In practice the biggest win is turning all the Excel files that live in one person's head each, into a shared, automated workflow.
EMS vs OEM: same tool, different reference truth
EMS (is-cost): quote your own builds accurately and fast; calibrate to your own costing sheet. How to get the Starter Kit gets you a working model to calibrate.
OEM (should-cost): know what a part should cost to negotiate or make-or-buy; calibrate to supplier quotes. The Global region (and when to use regional rates) covers the regional rate sets used for should-cost work.