No one could explain to me exactly what he did but I know he moved to China to oversee its manufacture.
When you ever experienced production outsourced to China you know you have to give them extremely detailed, fool-proof instructions, so there is not the slightest chance of absolutely no misunderstandig at all whatsoever.
I designed some electronics being produced by several chinese companies. Even if you thought you respected and answered all questions you learned from former productions in
ALL cases there
always have been
lots of queries about details, even very minor ones, an european or northamerican manufacturer would have never had asked, because you thought that would be clear.
Example: I used to design small protection circuit electronics for LiIon batteries. For security reasons I also masked the
vias. (Vias are the litte holes, where a conducting track changes from one side of a PCB to the other. By default those are not masked - lacquered; mostly by default green; that's why vias are golden/silver, and not green like the tracks, because they are left blank, because they are good for contacting stuff like testing equipment.) I changed the mask to have them lacquered, for to have fewer possibilities for random short circuits. I thought my gerber files (electronics manufacture data) says it all, what I want, as I also specifically told them in my mails, and in the comments attached to the gerber files and the BOM. No. With every new PCB I designed that way and ordered, they again had to ask me if I'm aware of the vias are masked and if I'm sure that I want it this way.
And many other, way more minor things I can't remember at the moment.
Sometimes it felt like I had to program a robot, need to think of even the least detail, or the thing rejects to work correctly.
I sometimes could not help the feeling they were incapable to think for themselves, but I'm convinced it's just because they don't want to make the slightest mistake and fully satisfy their customers, because reclaims and corrections are something pointless at these shipping distances, with those production costs. And they for sure don't want to lose a customer to their many competitors by he was not fully satisfied.
If you have something more complex like a plastic housing - the finished product is a cheap piece of plastic, so its design and production set-up seems to be a simple, trivial task. But in reality it's kind of tricky, needs experience; the production of the piece of plastic afterwards cost almost nothing, but it's about to get the (very expensive) casting mould tools right, because due cooling you need to respect volume shrinking, shape changes, stress etc. - so, it's often better you have somebody directly on-site being the communication interface between the local manufacturers and the development departement in HQ.
