Thoughts
I hope you've enjoyed the quick tour around Biloda and ECSM, to see how ECS make a mainboard from PCB upwards. Their staff work extremely hard, and to the highest standards they can obtain, to shake off the old PC Chips stigma and produce high-quality mainboards that stand up to the competition. That investment in good people and good production techniques seems to be paying off. ECS put more stock in the human resources they have than any technical resources they've built or acquired. The human element stands out at ECS, big time, and that was good to see. Everyone works as a massive 1000+ person team to keep to their targets, and they're rightfully proud of what they've got.Albert and the guys took great pleasure in showing the other editors and myself around Building 26 and Biloda, happy to show the world how they do their business and make their products.
So next time you purchase a mainboard, think about the guys and gals that put them together, since it's not completely automated. Many hands touch your mainboard before you do and hundreds of eyes watch it through every production step, to make sure you get a good product. Mainboard margins are painfully low for the guys that make them, skimming bare cents from each to make their money. Volume counts and the people are pushed a lot harder that I thought they'd be, to keep that volume up.
From PCB upwards, it a massive task. My big thanks to Andrew at ECS U.K., Adam at ECS Taiwan, Sarah at ECS U.K.'s PR company and all the folks at Biloda and Building 26 for letting HEXUS have a peek inside their production facilities to see how one of the core components in your PC takes shape. It's highly likely that you've bought or used an ECS-made mainboard in your computing lifetime, so I hope seeing how they're made was interesting and insightful.
If you want HEXUS to do more of those kinds of trips and write more of these kinds of articles, let us know and we'll see what we can do. After Computex is the perfect time, as you've seen with Paul infiltrating ASUS recently, so keep it all in mind and let us know what Taiwanese component manufacturer you want us to look inside next.
