How did the expedited fee for PCB come from?

When it comes to PCB rush, everyone is no stranger! PCB is called “the mother of electronics” because it is the carrier of all electronic materials. Without this carrier, no matter how good the scheme is, it can’t be implemented! However, as a customized product, PCB has a long production process, complex production process and long production cycle. So often, when the production cycle cannot be met, our engineers have to choose expedited treatment! At this time, the PCB factory will charge a fee: the expedited fee. What will happen to this expedited fee then? Let’s talk about how this expedited fee is generated from three aspects:
1. Pre-investment cost.
As an urgent order, the pre-investment of PCB is very large, because due to the time limit, the time of each working procedure is very dead, and it is necessary to ensure that the flow of each production procedure must be very smooth. If a certain percentage of quality abnormality occurs in a certain working procedure, if it is not processed as an urgent order, it will be scrapped directly, and then the next working procedure will be continued with a good board. Generally, the pre-investment of conventional emergency board is 20%-40%. For some difficult boards, such as HDI boards, high-storey, dense boards, the pre-investment is even several times of the order number.

II. Risk cost.
Expedited orders must be very urgent for customers. Since the expedited fee has been collected, the board factory must ensure that the goods are delivered to customers within the specified time. As for the time risk in this process, the quality risk is assessed and borne by the board factory itself! Especially for some difficulty boards, in the case of urgency, it is likely that there will be too much scrapping, or even the risk of all scrapping and redoing.

III. Coordination of personnel and equipment.
For urgent orders, the PCB factory will first make special marks on the production flow card, such as making a red list, so that every workstation will pay attention to it and give priority to the list. However, there are too many PCB production processes, and the situation of each order is different. Therefore, for the urgent board, special production planners are required to follow up. In PCB factory, you can often see planners running around the workshop with boards in their arms. This is a common occurrence.
At the same time, the priority of expedited orders will inevitably affect the production capacity of the production line. Many PCB processes need to be processed by machines and equipment. In order to ensure the delivery date of the expedited order, the machines need to be ready to change online machines at any time. If a machine receives several urgent orders at intervals of one day, its capacity will inevitably be greatly affected.
There are also some cases, such as urgent orders that need to be made separately for film and online edition, and some urgent orders in batches that need to be opened separately for a electroplating bath. these will increase a lot of hidden costs.
In this way, the urgent order not only occupies the labor cost, but also occupies the fixed production capacity of the factory.
   
Through the introduction of the above three points, I believe everyone has a general understanding of the generation of expedited fees. As for the charging standard of expedited fee, there is actually no fixed standard for this, but there is still a market price in PCB industry, which is not much different! For special orders, such as difficult orders, batch orders and orders with complicated processes, specific evaluation is required.

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