The manufacturing facilities
Some ten thousand employees work in the 114,000m2 area within ECS's ShenZhen manufacturing facility. Currently, the facility has 73 surface-mounted component production lines, 32 manual insertion lines, 32 testing & packing lines, along with 2 lines for pilot runs of new designs. Along with the aforementioned motherboard capacity of 2.5-million a month, 1.5-million add-on cards and 250-thousand notebooks can be manufactured too.
The manufacturing facility is located such that it's little more than an hour away from two airports, through which packages can reach Europe and the U.S. in three or four days. Just five minutes away is Yanian seaport, where volume shipments make their way by boat to the E.U. and the US in three weeks or so.
ECS explained to us how the motherboard creation process can be broken down into seven distinct phases. The first step is the initial proposal of a new product. Planning of the product follows this, where requirements and features are specified, along with any constraints (cost, power consumption, etc). With a clear plan, the new board can then have a design created for it. Once this is done the design can be tested in the R&D labs.
Once happy with the work in the labs, engineering samples can be created. During this step, manufacturing and testing issues must be considered. These include output capacity, how much manpower production will be required, where any hold-ups might occur, what software will be used to test the hardware and what the testing procedure will be.
Following a successful engineering pilot run, the issues identified and plans devised during that step can be implemented for a pilot run of full production. The quality of output from the production pilot can be examined and tweaks to the production process made before the final stage, which is of course, mass production.
So, the motherboard sat in your computer, that was once mass-produced, probably stems from somebody writing a proposal for a new product, that somebody obviously liked. The product was then designed, planned and made in a lab, at which point it probably looked quite different to what eventually rolls off the mass-production line some time later.
Last year we showed you how ECS's motherboard manufacturing lines take a PCB and turn it into a working product, so if you want a little more info on the final phase of board production, check out our ECS Production Tour 2005: How to build a mainboard, ECS style
At a smaller facility in ShenZhen, 1130 ECS employees work at a notebook manufacturing facility, where 250,000 products a month can be made. The facility consists of two types of manufacturing line. There are three conveyor lines, designed for large quantity orders. As the notebooks traverse the conveyor they are assembled, tested, undergo a 'burn-in' process, are tested again, and then finally get packaged up.
The alternative manufacturing lines are known as 'cells'. There are two of these cells, both much smaller than the conveyor lines. Cells can fulfill smaller orders for notebooks or indeed desktop systems. In addition to the cell and conveyor lines, three sub-assembly lines also exist, for the assembly of modules required by other lines.
That's all there is to it...
If you read our piece last year on how to build a mainboard, you'll know just how much attention to detail is required for that part of the process alone. However, this year we've learned more about the design and verification process; what comes before mass production. This requires even more thought and care, to allow a product to get to a stage where it can successfully be mass produced. We've also seen how manufacturing lines vary depending on size and product.
Hopefully you now know a little more about what a big manufacturer like ECS has to do to deliver a product to customers. A 15% share of the motherboard market says that ECS is doing something right, and the company's different lines will continue to grow in shipments, we expect.
We'd like to thank ECS ELITEGROUP, and especially Andrew Tseng, Director of Pan European Product Marketing from ECS UK, for letting us find out a little bit about its different manufacturing facilities. Also, big up to the folks at Futurelooks for some photography assistance. We'll leave you with a group shot of the attendees. Try to spot the mighty Mr. Ross. He's in there somewhere...
