Re: [Paparazzi-devel] Lisa PCB pool

[Chris Gough]

> The issue I had was that our university accounts dpt (and possibly others)
> don't like buying things from someone who isn't a 'supplier' by their
> definition.

Yeah, accounting systems need an identified "vendor" to issue a
purchase order (to register a  claim for payment, to hand over money).
The old-world procurement model is not designed with
single-transaction collectives in mind (or response-time optimisation,
they are efficiency-optimised based on the assumption that price is
more important than time - often false in R&D context).

That should be relatively simple to solve in the scheme of things,
just insert some sort of broker (fascade) between the collective and
the accountant, and the accountant will see what looks like a vendor
to them.

> It would be a shame to see the paparazzi vendors' business greatly impacted,
> so I wonder why none of them are yet stocking Umarims or (to a lesser
> extent) Lisas with reasonable availability?

I can't speak for the other vendors, but from my (aerofu) perspective,
people that order in quantity and wait through a manufacturing
lead-time are not core business.

The reason I don't stock Umarims or Lisas right now is that it would
be an expensive gamble, given the new hardware in development, current
sales volumes and the batch size required to get the cost of
manufacturing down. The hardware changes faster than the small retail
market can support (with a stovepipe manufacturing model).

If we-the-market could collaborate to eliminate duplication of risk
and cost, the supply chain might be able to keep up with the fast
hardware development cycles a little better. Vendors are just buffers
in a much larger system, a kind of financial capacitor. The rest of
the system enjoys many benefits from being collaborative, transparent
and open. The proprietary, opaque and closed matter-compiler is a
bottleneck that limits the whole system's (communities) capacity to
thrive.

>I recently ordered my own batch
> of Umarims from a manufacturing facility, and was impressed with the result,
> but for smaller quantities this would be impossible.

10 is a small quantity, tooling costs (stencils, PCBs, etc) seem to be
$600-$1K. 100-150 units seems to be the sweet spot, tooling costs are
spread out and the BOM is just about large enough to source on the
spot market (rather than rent-paying middle-men that actually hold
stock).

Chris Gough

> Many thanks,
> Gareth R
>
>
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