First articles, also known as batch run or first-run amongst other terms, is when a customer requests the first several finished PCBAs from a production run be delivered for inspection before the entire quantity is built. In this episode we go over when it's appropriate to request first articles (and when it's not), the difference between first articles and prototypes, examples of how using first articles has benefitted our customers. Chris also introduces us to his fascinating new theory regarding the pen industry.
How to request first articles from CircuitHub
pickplacepodcast.com
First articles, also known as batch run or first-run amongst other terms, is when a customer requests the first several finished PCBAs from a production run be delivered for inspection before the entire quantity is built. In this episode we go over when it's appropriate to request first articles (and when it's not), the difference between first articles and prototypes, examples of how using first articles has benefitted our customers. Chris also introduces us to his fascinating new theory regarding the pen industry.
How to request first articles from CircuitHub
pickplacepodcast.com
Welcome to the pick place podcast, a show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington,
Melissa:And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub
Chris:long time. Welcome back, Melissa.
Melissa:very long time.
Chris:Apologies to the listeners. We've yeah, we've been slacking. no. we have not been slacking.
Melissa:So really what happened is Chris got sick.
Chris:Yeah, we'll say that we, I got sick? I did get
Melissa:yeah, you did get sick. Not for the entire time. Cause then I would be concerned.
Chris:It's just been crazy busy, crazy, crazy busy. I apologize if I have a slight frog in my throat, I'm still recovering from said sickness, but Yeah. it turns out you can get ill with something besides COVID in 2021. There's other diseases out there
Melissa:Hm, that happened to me last year. When you haven't been sick for a really long time. You realize how annoying being sick is.
Chris:It is the worst. It is the worst. And it's like, oh, Hey, I get to be home. And like, this might be kind of cool, but like everything hurts. So nothing is enjoyable. Even if you just want to read a book, no, it just, it hurts to read a book and you try to sleep and you wake up with a headache and you know, you all right, let's watch a movie and you're like, you can't pay attention to the movie. Cause you're coughing the whole time. No, there's nothing enjoyable about getting sick. That's my pet peeve of the week getting sick.
Melissa:But not actually though, right.
Chris:Not actually not actually not actually.
Melissa:You have one? You said you have one we'll find out later.
Chris:oh yes, I do. I have one and I'm excited to share it. So, but yeah, the, the podcast shall continue apologize for the break and if you've missed us, thank you very much for missing us and we're happy to be back.
Melissa:What are we talking about this week, Chris?
Chris:So one of the things that you know, maybe, maybe customers are familiar with but maybe they're not, especially if you know, you're a junior engineer and maybe you haven't been down this road before is the process of requesting first articles. Now there's a lot of different names for this process. It could be, you know, batch run first run . We're going to call it first articles. First articles is what we're going to be referring to here. And not just internal first articles. Cause we do internal first articles all the time where we you know, we are checking our own manufacturing processes. So whenever we make a change to a product, we have to get that signed off to verify that we've done the first piece of the first couple pieces properly. So for example when we first place components onto a circuit board and we fully populated that circuit board and it's still sitting in the wet solder paste, we will have somebody who's qualified come over and verify that all of the placements are accurate, that they're correct orientation. And. All that kind of stuff to make sure that that was done properly. That's an internal first article process. And then there's the next change, then there's a reflow and we get a first article done on that and then there's the through hole and we'll get a first article done on that and on and on and on. There's always, you know, anytime we make a change to the product
Melissa:Or it's the first time we see a product
Chris:Oh yeah. Well, I mean, even if it's not right, so, that's a great point melissa. So if it's the first time we've seen a product we might have to do a really thorough first article because we, we don't know, everything about it yet. If it's the second time we built it, we'll have documentation that'll show us how it's supposed to look, but we'll still do a first article process. It'll just be so much easier because we have a documented now, right? We have, we have all the photos and everything to verify, you know, so if there were any questions before we've solved them all already. So the first article process is always much, much faster for the second time we're building it. So you, you make a good point. But what we're talking about is not first articles internally. We've mentioned that a number of times before in previous episodes and obviously just gave a jist of what it is again, but we're talking more about first articles for our customers. This is where you have a product. And maybe you've either never scaled it up before, or you've never worked with us to make it for you before. Maybe you've made some, some minor change to it. And you just want to verify that everything works, right. So, you know, you, you start out with, well, This is an important detail. What is the difference between a first article on a prototype?
Melissa:Good question some people think that they can be used interchangeably and they can definitely not.
Chris:they can definitely not. Now I will say a prototype can be used for a first article, but a first article should not be used as a prototype. That's, that's very different. So for example say, you know, you're, this is the first time you're building product a and you you've, you've designed it. And you've you, you know, this first time you do in your layout you know, first time doing your bill of materials, selection. And, and it's the first time to build something. That's a prototype. You have no idea if it's going to work, you have no idea what mistakes you've made yet. And trust me, you've made mistakes. Like, I mean, I, I it's, it's the most senior engineers in the world will tell you that no matter how much experience they have, they've made mistakes in their prototypes and they've caught them and corrected them. It's just, you know, it is not uncommon to go through a, B, C, D E revisions. On one product that we did for a customer we are on revision E at this point, still discovering mistakes we made in the design. You know, it's just, it's just normal. And that's after shipping many, many, many of them it's the rev D was the shipping product. Rev E was a minor change to improve manufacturability, but regardless prototypes are necessary. First articles are a totally different beast. They're a totally different beast. So let's say Melissa has designed the next great, you know, wearable thing that monitors, you know, glucose levels or whatever, you know, she's, she's this brilliant engineer. Who's come up with a great prototype and it's working and she's on rev. C of her prototype and, and she's very happy. All the boards came back from Worthington and everything worked great. But now she has an investor in and they say, all right, we, we want to get these into clinical trials. We're going to need a thousand of them. Well, a prototype is not necessarily a production run, right? Like going from five pieces to a thousand pieces is, is quite, quite different. We will, we will probably even use a different process. To build that thousand pieces that we use for the five pieces. So for the five pieces, maybe we didn't use a stencil. Maybe we got by, by a jet printing the product, and now we're switching to a stencil because now we need a thousand of them and the jet printers, not going to be able to keep up with a thousand and it's not going to have the same consistency and yada yada yada, there's lots of reasons that you would make that change for a thousand pieces. Well, Melissa's going to get her thousand pieces back and she's going to be like, Hey, how come these don't work now? You know, my prototypes worked fine. What did you guys change? And that's where first articles become really, really handy. This is where you basically, you make a request, you say Hey, you know, CircuitHub Worthington. I have investors that want me to build a thousand of these now. But I want, I want you to send me the first X number of pieces off the assembly line to prove that, you know, your, your manufacturing process is going to work and that we're going to have the results we expect. It's a small bit of insurance, right? It's a small bit of, you know, risk not analysis. What's the word I'm looking for? You just trying to reduce risk. All right. So, it's a small bit of insurance. So what we'll do, let's talk about what actually happens, right? To build a first article you basically have to use all the same processes that you would to build a thousand pieces, but you're only going to build maybe 10 pieces, Which which can be quite expensive, because that means you're probably you're, you're having to load every feeder, every tray, every tube you're having to set up the stencil printer you're having to program every machine you're having to program your probably selective soldering machine. Maybe you need to get custom tooling, maybe. Right. That's not uncommon. We have we have this one customer who has this led array and they're through-hole LEDs. And actually they might not actually be LEDs. They might be some kind of sensor but they look just like LEDs. And, you know, they need to be held at just such a height and, and they need to be, you know, centered on their footprint within plus or minus a 10th of a millimeter. And it's like, okay, well we have to get custom tooling made to do that. So we might have to get all that done. Right? So there's all these expenses that go into building a 10 pieces that normally you can amortize over a thousand pieces and it's not all that crazy expensive, right? Because you've advertised it over a thousand pieces. And so whatever, say it was cost thousand dollars in, in, in setup charges or whatever. Well, it's only, it's only $1 per, per product that we've built. And so it doesn't seem that expensive, but when you're only building 10, now you have to spread a thousand dollars of setup over 10 pieces. Right. Gets pretty expensive. That is an expense that your manufacturer cannot fully absorb. Right. They cannot you know, just build a first article totally for free. And we we've, we tried to get creative in the past because nobody like, we don't want to have to set this up for 10 pieces. Right. Nobody wants to do that. We want to build a thousand pieces. Actually, no, we, we really like building 10 pieces. I would prefer a thousand order of a thousand pieces. But the, the that expense, you know, it doesn't feel good going to your customer and saying, Hey, you know, we have to build these first articles or, you know, you've requested these first articles. We're going to have to charge you an extra setup fee for, all this work it doesn't feel good to do that right. So we used to, in the past, we used to try to get creative where we would say, okay you can, you can come in to our factory with your testbed and, and your instruments. And we'll build the first one. And, you know, w we should be ready by 3:00 PM. We'll keep everything set up and you test the first one. And if it's all good, we'll hit the go button and we'll get. Sounds great. Doesn't it?
Melissa:Yeah, but it doesn't work that way does it?
Chris:It was always a disaster. It was always a disaster. We, I mean, we, we must've tried it like four or five times. I remember one time I was, I was, you know, we were willing to do this for a customer. We said, okay, show up at two o'clock. We should have your first articles done by then. And you know, they showed up. Bench set up for them. We get got their scope set up and got 'em power. Got 'em on wifi. They're all prepared. We're build the first piece. And then you know, he's, he's having trouble getting it to work. And then he's on the phone with his engineers back at the office and they're going back and forth and all of a sudden, like, it's like, it's like eight o'clock at night and I'm like, Hey. You know, I, I have to go home. Like, I,
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:we can't just hang out at the factory all day here. And I remember the customer getting very upset with me, like, oh, you're kicking me out. And I'm thinking what? This is not what we signed up for. Like, we were supposed to hit the go button at 2:30, you know, two o'clock you say? Okay here's here's your first piece. I'll give you 30 minutes to test it. And then we hit the go button at 2:30, not shutting down the assembly line for
Melissa:Yeah. Meanwhile, nothing else is getting assembled.
Chris:nothing else is getting assembled. And it's like, okay, well technically we should be charging you X number of dollars per hour. You know, this is a million dollars worth of assembly equipment that's sitting idle. You know, we, we, we, we can't just let that sit idle. It just never worked. It was, it was always a disaster. It turns out the reason the first articles didn't work is not because it was the first article. It was because it was drum roll. Prototype. very, very different, you know? So, we have learned our lesson since then. If you've never built this product before, or you've made major changes to the product Order prototypes, please, please order prototypes. Just, I know it's so tempting to just be like, okay, order a thousand of everything and a thousand boards and, and it should be fine. Everything will be fine. And then you, then you find yourself in a position where you're like, oh, I can't use all these boards. And it's like, well,
Melissa:Well, that's a, yeah, that's something we didn't mention is that if we do first articles, we order the entire amount of bare boards and the BOM upfront.
Chris:Exactly.
Melissa:if you, if they don't work, you are responsible for the entire cost.
Chris:That's right. That's right. That's why it's no substitution for prototyping.
Melissa:You might think you're saving a bunch of money, but
Chris:you're playing with fire, you're playing with fire. If you make a minor change I can, I can understand where you're like, Hey look, you know, we just added a 10 K resistor here or something. It's like, all right, well, you know, that's relatively low risk. I can understand why you wouldn't want to get another prototype built, but you should probably get first articles, built you know, but if you're making any kind of significant change to the product, you should get another round of prototypes built. I use the same exact, well, we were talking about earlier, we're on rev E of this, this product we designed for a customer. I still built a prototype of it, even though I know it was a very minor change. I basically just changed like the position of one diode and, and rerouted one trace, but I still built a prototype because. I've learned from so many of my customers prototypes are still very valuable. Yeah. So to Melissa's point, we're going to order a, when, when you order a thousand of something even if we request first articles, we are still going to build a thousand PCBs and we're going to order a thousand parts. And if you can't use all thousand of those PCBs you know, if we, if we built 10 and they don't work and you need to make a change. Well, you have to pay for all thousand of them. They're, they're useless to you. They're useless to us, you know, there's nothing we can do with them which you don't want to go through that you just want to order your prototypes, you know, the, the parts can probably be reused, right? The parts chances are your bill of materials is not going to change drastically. Especially usually your more expensive parts you're going to, you're still gonna use, you might change a cap or resistor here and there, but for the most part, you're still gonna use all of those expensive parts. So that's fine. You know, you're, you're not going to lose money there but but yeah, you probably would just lose money in the that the. Setup costs and the tooling costs stencil and anything, any other special tooling we have to order we tend to be, you know, pretty nice to our customers. We don't, we don't charge them for programming machines, stuff like that. I know that used to be a common thing where, you know, there was a line item, you know, SMT programming and selective solder programming. And that that's not really yeah, I mean, it is, it is an expense.. It's something that we have to pay for. Right. It's not free. We don't just let people sit in office chairs for, for, for fun. But you know, we it's, it's one of those kinds of like, alright, yeah, we're taking a little bit of a risk here by not charging you that, and, and it is what it is. But yeah, so, so how, how exactly what happens next, right? So you, you make a request for first articles. As we've talked about in previous episodes. Gosh, which episode, where did we talk about panelization? Wasn't that an episode? Or did we, is that something I wanted to talk about, but we haven't actually talked about yet. I don't think we've actually talked about it yet. we have not talked about panelization yet.
Melissa:Did We Not? Talked about, we talked depaneling.
Chris:Depanelization. Well, panelization is its own separate beast because there's all kinds of things you have to do to design a product or to design a panel to make it manufacturable.
Melissa:yeah.
Chris:We are going to do one of two things when it comes to the product that we build for you, we are either going to design the panel ourselves, or we're going to request that our PCB fab designed the panel for us. So we don't necessarily know right away when you request first articles, how many we're going to build for you? Because if you have a little tiny board, you know, built for like, I don't know, like a microphone or something. You know, that panel might be literally 250 boards in a
Melissa:Yeah. yeah.
Chris:Versus if you're, you know, you're making some kind of backend control module for a machine and chances are, it might just be one board in your panel or maybe two or anywhere in between. So, usually the panels are, you know, they're roughly the size of a sheet of paper, you know, eight and a half by 11. We tend to like them a little bit smaller than that. Here I am using using free freedom units here.
Melissa:How dare you?
Chris:How dare I, we, we really like, you know, panels. 200 by 150 millimeters. That's like a real happy place for a panel size. And so, you know, you can take that and get a rough estimate as to how many first articles we're going to build for you. Cause we're going to want to build one panel. You know, if you want more, you? know, say, say, say your panel is just a two up. You know, you've got a pretty good sized board and it's, and there's just two boards in a panel and you say, Hey, I want, I want a six first articles. Okay. We'll build, we'll build three panels. That's fine. Like, well, it doesn't have to be just one panel that we built. We'll build that for you. But at that means everything. It's setting up every feeder, setting up the stencil printer, all the conveyors, the reflow of, and profile the, the all that stuff has to get set up and then that's all lost. Right? So once we build that panel we have to tear that all down again, and there's, there's significant expense associated with that. And we have a formula for calculating that. And if you reach out to us, we can tell you, you know, how much that's going to be. There's kind of a. There's like, even if you only have one part on your board, there is a minimum fee because there's still lots of processes we have to follow, regardless of if it's one piece or a R or one part or a hundred parts, but you know, and then it's usually based on the complexity of your product, how many unique part numbers there are, and a few other factors, but yeah, so you'll get, you'll get a quote basically says, are you okay with this cost? And then if you are, then we build your first articles. Okay. I think we've emphasized this well enough, but that first article should be a known product. It should be something that, you know, already works.
Melissa:If you reach out to us and you request for articles, we will definitely ask you how have you built this product before? And does it work because there's a chance that we will deny your request forfirst articles,
Chris:Cause you're talking about drum. Roll again. Say it with me, Melissa.
Melissa:1, 2, 3, prototypes.
Chris:Yes. prototypes. So very, very different. And you can tell, like, this is, this is an episode built out of a pet peeve
Melissa:That's true. Yup.
Chris:because we've been down this road so many times, but yeah. Prototypes and first articles are two totally different beasts. So what first articles are great for is if you are proving us, right. It's it's. You know, is the manufacturing process going to result in, in the way I expect it to I'll give you an example. So we had this, we had this really great experience recently with a long, long time customer literally longtime customer, as in, as in over 10 years. We've been building products for these guys and they, they moved a new product to our factory. Just they, they, they keep ramping up and they couldn't, they couldn't do it all in one factory. So, so they were doing their overflow for them. And they they've been building this product for almost 10 years. They know it works. And yet they still did a first article and I'm so glad they did because they, they came in and they tested the first piece. We still charged them. Right. We didn't, we didn't do the whole thing. Like I talked about earlier, where we tried to leave the SMT line set up and everything, we didn't, we, we tore down the SMT line. We'd literally just built those two pieces, but they came in to visit us. They came in with our test fixture and they were going over with us, the test process, low and behold. We power it up. And the thing had like 13 relays on it. And these relays just sounded like they're firing like crazy. And they're like, ah, that's not supposed to happen. And so they, you know, they we unplug it and they're like, you know, I'm not sure what's wrong. Uh we'll, we'll take these back to our shop and we'll look at them. They get back to us the next day. And we had populated a voltage regulator. Backwards 180 degrees off the polarity was wrong. The crazy thing is the markings on the voltage regulator. They, to, to, to any anybody who's ever been doing circuit board assembly for a living would look at those markings on the voltage regulator and look at the markings on the circuit board and go. This lines up this way and our customer totally agreed. They go, we totally understand how you got this wrong because the markings we put on the board look like they're supposed to line up with this, but they don't. These are actually supposed, you know, so when we're building them, they look like we're building them wrong, but they are being built. Right. That was a great example of where first articles were necessary. And as soon as we reversed those everything worked great. We ended up building a few hundred of them. They all work great. You know, we, I think we had just a couple of failures, but that was unrelated to that, but that's a perfect example of it wasn't a prototype.It was a known product. They'd been building for 10 years, but they needed to prove that our process was going to build it correctly too. And there's one little voltage regulator we had wrong and thank goodness, we didn't build all 300 that way, because that would have been, you know, there's two of them per board that we're going 600 voltage regulators. We had to reverse. I don't know how many hours worth of manual labor, right? I mean that's yeah, it's, it's, it's huge. And, and we thought we did it right. The customer even looked at it and noticed it and in our factory and thought it looked right. It wasn't until they actually brought it back to their their factory. And they looked at, they looked at boards, you know, functional boards on their shelf. And they said, oh, look, this is actually reversed. And yeah. so that was, that was an excellent example of the use of first articles. So what happened next? Once we got that approval, they said, you know, just make this change. You don't need to build another round of first articles. That was the first thing I wanted to do. I said, no, I want to build, I want to build another round. And they're like, no, no, no. It's fine. If you just reverse these it's totally fine. And what we did is we had real nice documentation to explain to everybody how it's supposed to look. We had pictures, right? And, and when we built the rest of them, they all came off fine. So that's exactly what we'll do with, with our customers now is if we build them first articles and, and they do not work and they discover why they don't work. If it's a simple change, we'll make that simple change. And then we get the approval and, and we'll run off the rest of them for them. It works great. It's, it's a fantastic process. We are thrilled to be able to do it. We, we like it when customers request it, because it gives us a certain level of comfort. Like, oh, these people know what they're doing. Right. They, you know, somebody who requests first articles. It's like, how do I put it? You ever go into, okay. You ever travel and you go into a, you go into like a you're like, oh, let's, you know, let's get some coffee. You're out with your friends. Let's go get some coffee before we get started for the day. And you walk out. And, you know, it's like real busy, it's real buzzing. And there's, there's all kinds of stuff everywhere. Especially if you're in like New York or you're in some kind of busy city you're not familiar with. And you know, they're either like, oh, you get, you know, that anxiety that builds. You're like, am I going to do this right? Am I going to do this right? Am I going to order this? Right? Like, do they call them larges here? Or are they do they call them Grande's are you,
Melissa:You mean every time I go into any place new ever Chris?
Chris:Right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, that like sort of anxious feeling of, of, of like, yeah, I am, am I going to do this? Right? The, the, the, the barista behind the counter, w you were a barista, right?
Melissa:Oh yeah.
Chris:you, when, when. You sense that anxiety, right? You sense that somebody else doesn't know what they're doing yet? And they come to you and they're like asking for a large, and you're like, we, we only serve grand here or whatever it is, you know, like they ask for, they ask for a bagel and you're like, Yeah. these aren't bagels. These are whatever. I don't know what it is. You know what I'm saying? They're doing something wrong. And you're like, Oh, boy, this customer is not going to have a good experience because they already don't know the system. They don't know. That's how it feels when to us,
Melissa:oh, I know when someone asks, sorry, just going back to my barista days when someone asks, when someone tries to order a cappuccino, but you know that like, they don't actually know what a cappuccino is and they really want a latte.
Chris:Right, right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Which lattes are superior to come cappuccinos. I'm a latte guy. Anyway. So the, the, that that we get that same sort of anxiety when customers come to us and they they're like, okay, I need, I need 3000 of these. And we're like, oh, we've never built these before. You sure. You want 3000 of these, like, I don't know that you really think you want 3000 of these. So sometimes we will just insist on it. We'll just say like, look, we've never, we've never built these before. We don't want to build 3000 of these, you know, and it's, it's a $50,000 order and you come back to us and you say none of these work, you know, like, okay, well, w I, you know, I don't know what to tell ya, So, yeah, we, we will oftentimes insist on look. I, I, I know you got a tight lead time. I know you've got investors breathing down your neck. I know you got competitors that are going to beat you to market, but you know, we have to build first articles. We cannot take on this risk,
Melissa:Well, I think we will first suggest that they build a prototype.
Chris:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, I'll give you an example, Melissa. So this customer I was telling you earlier, who did the first articles with us? We didn't insist on them building prototypes. Cause they'd been building that product for 10 years. Right. So it's a known product, right? Like we're, we're okay with them requesting first articles because we, they know that the circuit board and everything else is going to be fine. It's a relatively low risk. But we, you know, w w they insisted and we insisted. You know, to build first articles, because what if we, instead of building 300, what if we had built 3000 and we got all those voltage regulators wrong on all 3000, now 6,000 voltage regulators we had to like, that's just, and cause when we'd feel bad, right? Like we, we would look at that and we could, you know, if I was if I was I'm going to put on my Spock hat again, I was look at the markings on the board and be like, well, we built it. Right. You know, according to the design, this is. This is the print we populated exactly the way that it's supposed to be populated. And then the customer goes, you know, no. I I get what you're saying, but it's wrong. We can't use them. You have to rework them. Well, now who's at fault, right? Who's who's, who's going to be the first. Right? Right. So in order to avoid all that nonsense, a small, a small fee to build first articles to mitigate risk. Ah, that's the word I was looking for. Risk communication to mitigate risk. Let's just build some first articles. Uh let's let's make sure everything is tidy and everybody's going to be happier for it and we're going to learn. That's the other cool thing about first articles. We have this one customer we've been building products for our, for, for quite a while, lots of prototypes for them. And then some real short runs, some 50 pieces, a hundred pieces. And then they ordered a big, you know, $200,000 order with us, which was great. We were thrilled to get it. And we built first articles because even though it was an existing product, they had made some significant changes to it. And everybody agreed. It's a really expensive run. Let's build some first articles, the, the cool thing was the first articles actually worked. Right? They, they, the customer got them. Oh, there was one, it was one minor thing. I think there was, there was some resistor not populated that they expected to be populated I forget what it was, but it was a simple thing that, that as long as we made the change, we could build the rest of them. But anyway, the first articles work, bare boards were good. Bill materials was almost good except for that one change. And we, you know, they didn't know this, but we learned from building that first article that our stencil needed to change. We had we had some issues with clogging on it that had, we tried to build. You know, 3000 the very first day we would have just been struggling with this right. And so we just went ahead and just ordered a new stencil right away, made the changes we needed to make. And then we built another round of like 200 of them out of the batch of 3000. And then we discovered even more changes that we needed to make to our process. Now, When I say changes to our process, I'm not talking about big, major changes. I'm talking again, just like about the tooling, the stencil. We had to make an additional change to the stencil, just to keep the process nice and tight, just to keep the yields high. We didn't change the product at all. We were just trying to keep the yields high and try to prevent rework and that kind of stuff. So it was. That's another great thing. Like you're, you're going to prove that the manufacturing process works. We're going to learn from the manufacturing process. We're going to know. Okay. Is there something we can do to make, you know, the yields a little bit better? It's it's just a great, it's a great thing to do. It's a great insurance policy. It's a great risk mitigator. I cannot encourage you enough if you go out to order thousands of boards or even honestly, if they're very expensive, even if you're just ordering a few hundred boards, get first articles built.
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:You're everybody will be happier that I hit all the high points. Is there anything we're missing out on here? Well, we have a, we have a great frequently asked question on our, on CircuitHub's, website, can I request first articles for testing before completing the full run and it breaks all of this down. So, you know, you've listened to this, but then you can't remember the details of what Chris was rambling about. Go ahead and read that article. Yeah.
Melissa:I'll link that in the show notes.
Chris:That's actually that whole. That whole, whole FAQ is really, really good. There's a lot of great stuff in there. If you've, if you've been a user of circuit hub and you've never visited the FAQ, you could probably read every single article in there in like an hour and you would learn so much. And, and it's, it's funny because whenever, you know, whenever customers don't and inevitably there's a problem. We always know. They didn't read it, trust us. We know. And then, and it's a great resource for us, cause we just copied the link. We say, Hey, when you get a chance to read this over, it'll help you, you know, with consigning parts or whatever it is in the future. Oh, that could be a whole episode consigning parts who buddy
Melissa:yeah. We touched about that a little bit in part two of our parts purchasing episode that I'm busy transcribing, but I think we could probably go into a bit more detail on it. I'm sure.
Chris:Yeah. Nice. That'd be great. All right. So is it my favorite time of the show? Are we here?
Melissa:I think so. I think so.
Chris:Pet peeve of the week? All right. Okay. so. I got my booster shot yesterday and. Thank you I'm feeling good. I just got, you know, just a little bit of a sore arm from where the needle went in. Right. But otherwise I have 0, 0, 0 side
Melissa:really? Are you a Moderna guy or a Pfizer guy.
Chris:I got the Pfizer, I got the Pfizer was wasn't my, it wasn't cause I requested it. That's just what I got. And that's what I got my first couple of shots. I mean, you know what I think when I got my. Two shots. There was no choice. And then for the for the booster, I think we did get to choose, but I think I probably just said, well, I got Pfizer the first time. I'll get it the second time. I don't know if that was the right choice or not, whatever, it's, it's better than nothing I suppose. Anyway. And. Forms. Okay. When I requested the booster shot, right. I got it, done it at a local pharmacy, you know, big, giant multi-national pharmacy chain. And on, on the website, I filled out the form name, address, license number, you know, Blah, blah, blah. Like there's all kinds of questions they ask you, right? Just personal identifiable information, whatever, whatever they need for, for getting the shot. Right. Health, insurance card, all that kind of stuff. And then I, and then I get there and, and they hand me a form and I'm like, I've already answered all of this. Like it's all this, they want all the same information, but what is this like, am I being, is this gaslighting, like, why am I having to do this again? I swear. I already filled out all this information is where now here's the thing. You can't get a booster without an appointment. At least maybe you can. I dunno. I, I assume you have to have an appointment, but. I had to fill that thing out in order to get an appointment, to get the booster. So they obviously like when I show up and I say, Hey, you know, this is Chris Denny. I'm here for my booster. They have to check a list that says that he's on the list to get the booster. So clearly they have the documentation I've already filled out. Why am I filling out a form again? What is going on? I don't know. I don't get it. And, and what I, the, the overall pet peeve in general is like, particularly with the medical industry, forms are just like, I feel like I I've been coming to this doctor for 15 years and every time I come here, I have same forms I have fill out the same forms every time. What, what am I missing something? What am I, I, I, I feel like I'm going crazy. That's why I'm saying, I feel like I'm somebody gaslighting me because I, I, what I swear, this is just, I think, you know what it probably is, Melissa. I think it's the BIC pen industry. I think it's big pen.
Melissa:Yes, that that is it. That's definitely it.
Chris:'cause everybody steals those pens. And so doctor's offices has to sell more pens or, you know, they have to buy more pens. It's big pen that's who is pushing these extra forms that way there, they got to keep that sweet, sweet, disposable pen money coming in.
Melissa:yes, that, that is definitely it
Chris:I think we figured it out BIC gotta be or paper mate, maybe.
Melissa:I've actually, I feel like I've had the opposite situation. Myself recently. Cause I've yeah, cause I've had to go, I've had to go get like a couple of different like exams done. And both times, like I just went in there and they're like, th they don't even, they didn't ask for my ID. They're like, what's your name? What's your birth date? Okay. That's it. That's all I need. I'm like, I could just be lying. I could be a different person.
Chris:be great. But what are the chances that the name and the birth date are both correct? You know? I mean, that's pretty,
Melissa:No, no. Like I could be, I could be pretending to be Melissa,
Chris:Oh, oh, that's a good point. But what you're saying is if you filled out a form, then you must be the real Melissa Yeah. I'm telling you that it's it's BIC BIC has got a stranglehold on the market and they don't want to let that sweet, sweet disposable pen money get
Melissa:what happens when they switch to iPads?
Chris:Well, that's the thing, that's the other thing I'm thinking. It's like, why don't you just give me a QR code to the form? And then we'll just, we'll save each other the time. Cause what you're going to do with this piece of paper is you're going to scan it and then you're going to type it all in. Right. And then you're going to shred it and, and it's like, well, you know, we gotta, we gotta bring down big pen. That's the root cause here.
Melissa:Big pen
Chris:It's not, it's not pencil. Cause he, you know why they never give you a pencil to fill out a form.
Melissa:Y
Chris:is, this is a real thing. It's a dis it it is too easy to destroy the documentation.
Melissa:well, that's why you can't have them in the factory, right?
Chris:That's right. That's right. No pencils allowed at Worthington assembly because we got written up one. By our ISO auditor for using pencil when filling out forms, because it was too easy to destroy the data because you could erase it. It's like, it's like, well, you know, like lighters exist, right? Like if I really wanted to destroy this data, I could just set this form on fire
Melissa:Just throw it in the trash.
Chris:or throw it in the trash. Oh gosh, that's become, The biggest joke is, is, is how we can not have any pencils. So we had this. We had, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts is this podcast about a Tesla and just, it's like a just news and what's new and what's the new features and yada yada yada, and they were mentioning how Tesla never, ever, ever discounts their cars ever. And I discovered this when Hertz ordered a hundred thousand Teslas for their rental fleet. And they mentioned on the podcast, they paid list price for every 100,000 model threes that they ordered that blew me away, blew me away because you're like you're ordering a hundred thousand surely you're going to get some discount nope. They got not a penny off. And then apparently there's a tweet from Elon Musk from, I don't know how many years ago where he found out that salespeople were offering discounts to people and he said, you know, let me make it clearer. Something, something I'm paraphrasing, but no discounts ever. He goes, I will pay full price. My grandmother will pay full price. We never discount a Tesla. And I was telling this story because I don't like to give discounts at Worthington assembly either. It's like, Hey, this is the price. You take it or leave it. You don't like the price. Go find somebody else to build it for you. But this is, these are our prices. And when I told this story to the owners of Worthington assembly, they're like, Oh, I guess we have to throw out all our pencil sharpeners. We can't can't can't sharpen the pencil on that quote. Any, any further, oh gosh. So. So funny. Yup. That's us always joking about pencils at Worthington assembly. We are a barrel of laughs. So that's it. First articles, man. First articles in big pen. It's what everybody learned about today. And if you want to hear more of Chris Denny's conspiracies on big pen, you're welcome to email us a contact at pic place, podcast.com. And you can tweet at us at circuit hub. That'll be, that'll be Melissa and co and at w assembly will be myself and anybody else who feels like logging in.
Melissa:thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Chris:Thanks so much everybody down with big pen.