Summary of comments from Feb 2020 post by Chuck McCall

1. Flextronics (Guadaljara)

     a. From VP of ops at for at a fortune 500 company doing server hardware:

           i. Flex has a broad range of manufacturing capabilities and a very large campus there. 

           ii. I was building midrange Sparc servers.   Pretty complex and major test requirements.  

           iii. Flex claimed to have a very good test infrastructure (which might have worked if we were doing Intel servers) but we needed eventually to move it all back in house. 

           iv. Each Flex building on the campus has its own P&L so the vertical integration can be a pain if your chassis/PCBA and FA&T gets out of sync and you need one thing expedited to another building. 

           v.  Their tooling capacity was pretty impressive from what I remember.  

     b. From medical device developer, based on experience with Flex Medical, primarily in Shenzhen, had originally planned to set up manufacturing in their Tijuana plant:

          i.  I would not necessarily recommend going with them, depends on some different factors.

          ii. Complex electromechanical assemblies does fall into their wheelhouse.

     c. Notes from an SVP at multiple HW companies:

          i. They built a highly automated line for a project I worked on. PCBA plus top level assembly and test. 

     d. From a product design professional

          i. Used Flextronics Guadalajara back at Palm in 2005, good team,...local office in San Jose.

2. Celestica

      a. From VP of ops at for at a fortune 500 company doing server hardware:

          i.  Deeper technical bench than Flex, but I’ve usually found Celestica to have a deeper technical bench, probably in part from their IBM heritage.

          ii. I don’t remember anything particularly great or problematic about Celestica Monterrey, which probably means they worked better than average as usually I got involved when things got messy. 

          iii. There was a lot of drug violence around Monterrey at the time so we did restrict travel and hired local engineers and program managers. 

3. Jabil (Guadalajara and Chihuahua)

     a. From SVP at multiple HW companies

          i. Gaudalajara is much better and easier to get to from SF.

          ii. Chihuahua did good work but had higher turnover of staff and is hard to reach without direct flights.

          iii. Jabil will try to get you to work through their Bay Area pilot facility before moving to Mexico. Save yourself the hassle and just go straight to the factory in Mexico for any actual product builds. 

4. AsteelFlash (Tijuana)

     a. From SVP at multiple HW companies

          i. They are tier-2 relative to Flex and Jabil but might be worth considering.

     b. Notes from developer of smart lamp

          ii. The parent company is AsteelFlash in France, and they have a facility in Fremont which is a plus

          iii. AFG has quality systems in place though which are useful on an ongoing basis though I found they made a fair number of dumb mistakes and one serious one that cost us several months of schedule

          iv.  Communicating with them at the outset was difficult. I sent them multiple communications on the topic of material sourcing, in my case only available in the US, not Asia, and they chose a tooling vendor in Asia instead of in Mexico, then ended up switching back. I                did not monitor the progress of the tooling carefully enough either, and was shocked to find it had not been started even months after we cut the PO for it.

          v. Our situation with them was worsened by the fact that I selected a really bad Chinese metal parts vendor. We could not get to our price point with domestic nor many Chinese high quality shops. Ultimately I guess our product was not producible for what we needed                the cost to be. Anyway, to AFG’s credit, they worked to sort through piles of parts to find good ones, and they were welcoming and willing to work with me their at their plant in TJ to sort out the problems. Also ultimately we could not sustain orders which was a bad                situation for both us and them and they were good about working with us to address excess inventory.

          vi. Given all the other horror stories I have heard and grading on a curve, I would give them a B.  I would strongly consider local assembly houses you can drive to in less than an hour until you get to the >20K units / month stage.

5. Sanmina (Mexico City and Guadalajara)

6. Soluciones Tecnológicas,

     a. From a software executive based in Guadalajara

          i. An engineering house with a pretty nice manufacturing floor they use mainly for automotive stuff.

7. Control Plastics