How much of your outsourced work actually requires site visits? It’s standard practice to simply ship parts and prototypes around, going on-site maybe for production line setup and kickoff. I’ve done distributed and remote team hardware development without major issues, but of course this depends on what you’re building.
I haven’t really felt constrained by location when doing HW startup work. Prepare for a decent sized shipping budget (overnight shipping adds up) but it’s a drop in the bucket relative to salaries.
> In our case the final assembly for the product must be done by one or more specialized (certified well beyond ISO 9001) outsourced contract facilities
If you have ultra specialized requirements that only a few facilities can meet, I’d start by vetting those potential partners.
We are already determining the qualifications/vetting process for those specialized assembly houses.
> How much of your outsourced work actually requires site visits?
Visits should be minimal if the correct partnerships are in place as you suggest. This device ("instrument" in industry parlance) is intended to connect to industrial machinery, it may be difficult for outsourced skills to debug/tweak remotely, meaning visits from key outsourcers to our location are more than likely. To avoid that, we will have to figure out how to do that remotely.
I haven’t really felt constrained by location when doing HW startup work. Prepare for a decent sized shipping budget (overnight shipping adds up) but it’s a drop in the bucket relative to salaries.
> In our case the final assembly for the product must be done by one or more specialized (certified well beyond ISO 9001) outsourced contract facilities
If you have ultra specialized requirements that only a few facilities can meet, I’d start by vetting those potential partners.