About Agilian
Agilian’s offices and manufacturing facility are in Dongguan city, and more specifically in Chang’An district, which is contiguous with Shenzhen and 30mins from Shenzhen airport. You can see a map of our location and some guidance on how to visit us here.
Yes, unless it is very specialized and (with our customer’s agreement) it has to take place in another factory. Watch our factory tour video to get a sense of our assembly work.
Yes, we are as electronics are a key product category we work on for clients. An EMS (or electronic manufacturing services) supplier is a company that designs, tests, and produces electronic products.
We can actually be described as an Electronic Engineering Manufacturing Services (E²MS), because we also do part of the design and development work on new electronic products, provide prototyping in-house, manage the product’s industrialization through a solid NPI process, and we also have in-house PCBA capabilities as well.
How we can help you
Yes, definitely. We’d be glad to start making your product for you. Send us a sample or assembly video so that we can estimate the amount of time it takes to do the assembly, testing, and packaging. We will give a price per piece based on the number of seconds of assembly work.
If you know the bill of materials (i.e. list of components and their suppliers), we can use that as a basis for a ‘all included’ quotation per piece. We might suggest some changes in the supplier base, too, in order to avoid quality/timing issues.
Yes, we can review your engineering files, your prototype, and your bill of materials (if any) and we will indicate what is missing between now and the launch of mass production.
We have had customers come to us with a new product design, where they thought 90% of the work had been done, but in fact only 30% had been done. We can help you plan ahead so you set realistic timelines & budgets.
Maybe. We’d suggest you contact us and tell us a bit about your project. If your product is not simple and you need to do a lot of the design work first, we will let you know, and we will try to point you in the right direction.
Learn more about prototyping & small runs here.
No. That’s really not our strong point. Many of our clients work with an industrial designer first, for example for the shape of their product’s enclosure.
If you don’t know what packaging would make sense, we can make suggestions based on your situation.
One of our mechanical engineers can develop a custom packaging solution for your product. And we can follow up on the manufacturing of the packaging accessories.
No, as long as you pay us for the engineering, testing, and sourcing work we have done on your product. Our normal way of working is to have the client pay for that work, and to have all the deliverables in their hand so they are always free to switch to another manufacturer.
We are a manufacturer first and foremost. Making prototypes is a lot of work for our R&D team, so we prioritise our resources on the projects that will naturally lead to mass production.
Intellectual property (IP) protection
We are happy to sign a non-disclosure, non-use, and non-circumvention agreement. We can share ours, or we can sign yours (as long as there are no unusual terms).
No, we never own the IP of any product we work on for a client. That’s simply not our business model. For details, refer to our agreement templates.
There are several approaches here. Maybe they can simply be asked to provide a specific component with specific requirements & tolerances, without the need to know what the whole product is. Maybe they cannot ignore the whole product, and in that case they can first be screened (so you don’t share the information with many companies) and sign an enforceable non-disclosure, non-use, and non-circumvention agreement.
We are not lawyers, but our general advice is to first confirm there is market demand, second confirm the product can be made at the right price, and only after that to worry about patents. In some cases having a patent is possible and desirable, and in some countries you can apply for a temporary (provisional) patent for a low cost.
Working together with Agilian
Here at Agilian we work for:
- B2B and B2C companies (with B2B customers being slightly more common).
- Established companies and funded startups.
- Companies who are developing and manufacturing any kind of electro-mechanical product. If it fits in a regular industrial lift it can be assembled in our facility, and we work on a variety of specialty products, too.
Read more about who we work with here.
You have to pay for all the work we do when it comes to design engineering, sourcing of components, follow up on the development of custom components, etc.
In return, you own all the IP rights that are created, and you can do what you want with them. And you have visibility over the component suppliers and their prices, you have the latest versions of the engineering files, etc.
Learn more about pricing here.
We charge a fee for controlling the incoming components and managing the suppliers, on top of the components’ prices. We charge for the assembly service, based on the number of seconds needed per piece. We charge a one-time fee for preparing production lines. And other fees may apply (warehousing if some pallets have to be kept for a long time, etc.).
Learn more about pricing here.
Yes, a technical feasibility study or a DFM job with Agilian will typically start from US$5,000.
- Bill of Materials with part numbers, prices and terms, and whether a purchasing contract is already in place
- Work instructions for the assembly process, and if possible control plan
- Incoming QC and Outgoing QC checklists and other requirements, including go/no go gages, checking fixtures, etc. if any
- Testing jigs that were already developed, if any
- List of tests we would have to perform (e.g. temperature, vibration, dropping on the floor,…)
- Engineering Change Request process to follow, if any
- Some past Incoming QC and Outgoing QC findings, if possible
You will work with a project manager (or more than one, depending on the amount of work involved with your projects and/or orders) who can speak English.
Note that, as we are not a Chinese-owned factory, our management (the managers of production, quality, purchasing, NPI…) all speak English. You will not find yourself stuck with only one contact person, However, we expect that you direct your messages to your project manager in normal times. You will also have direct access to our top management if needed.
Sure. Since you pay for the sourcing work, you have the bill of materials in your hands. And, since you pay for the engineering design work, you also have the latest versions of those files in hand, too. We do not play games to force our customers to stay with us. You can stop our involvement and continue, with our support, to transfer to another team if that’s what you choose to do.
First, please check our 6 phase NPD process here.
Often, most of the work in phases 1 and 2 is done by the customer. Sometimes we handle phase 3, sometimes not. We are at our best providing feedback and suggestions in phases 1, 2, and 3, and then handling the work in phases 4, 5, and 6.
If you do not have a list of product requirements and an initial version of the industrial design (i.e. the aesthetics of the product), it is probably too early to involve us. But we are happy to provide feedback and point to the logical next steps.
That’s up to you. Here are two very common ‘first steps’:
- In many cases, we start by a design review in order to confirm it can be manufactured relatively easily, without issues that may lead to high costs or poor quality.
- In other cases, we start by looking for component suppliers, since engineers often work on the technical side of the project and do not work on setting up the supply chain.
Once we have started working on your project, we can usually provide you with an initial plan for the steps involved in the entire project, up to mass production. However, we usually can’t provide estimates of the budget and timelines after just one introductory phone call, as we need time to study the design and all its implications. That type of estimate usually comes after we have been working together and we have a full view of the project.
Every new product launch proect is unique in its own ways, however here’s some rough timings to give you a general idea.
- Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
- Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
- Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
- Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
- Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months
Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.
Yes. Each phase’s deliverables impact what needs to be done in the subsequent phases. Developing a new product always involves uncertainty, as difficulties appear both on the technical side and when selecting & qualifying component suppliers.
We never commit to an RFQ for a whole development project because so many unknowns have to be dealt with in the course of the project. And remember, each phase impacts the amount of work in all subsequent phases.
Typically, if we are involved in prototyping (stage 3), we can usually use the engineering bill of materials to estimate the full cost per piece (which does not include non-recurring engineering, tooling, and other expenses incurred during development). Depending on the project, we can also make an estimate if we are involved in the earlier feasibility study / proof of concept stage, too (stage 2).
Explore our new product development process/manufacturing project stages here.
“Successful” means “successful in the marketplace, without spending an inordinate amount of money and time on development”. Common signs of projects that will be successful are serious market research, efforts at simplifying the first version of the product, careful planning of all the upcoming steps, and adequate funding.
To an extent, yes. No manufacturer offers a full warranty that covers all issues whatever their origin and whenever they are reported. As per most of our contracts with customers, if more than a certain proportion of products do not conform to the specifications, we arrange for repair or replacements at our own costs if we are informed about those issues promptly. If you have specific requirements on the topic of warranty, please let us know in our first exchanges, as it impacts both the amount of pre-production engineering & testing (to keep the proportion of defectives low) and our costs.
Here’s a flowchart showing how a product R&D project with Agilian usually unfolds:
You can read more about this process here.
Ensuring quality
Yes. Like many other companies, we call it the “New Product Introduction process”, or “NPI process” in short. You can see its broad outline here. → How we work.
Depending on the product’s complexity, on the expected volumes, and other factors, we suggest a specific process. Some clients decide they want to skip some important validation steps, and in some cases we accept (but we warn them about the risks).
This is an everyday battle. It is not always easy, particularly for custom components with high requirements and relatively low volumes. To minimize the risks, we audit and qualify the suppliers of important/critical parts, we follow closely on their development when they have to make custom parts, we have incoming QC inspectors checking each batch of parts, our production operators also set aside the defective parts they find, and we send regular feedback to the suppliers.
The first step… is to define a quality standard. Many customers don’t know how to document their requirements in a specific way, so we often have to do a part of that work during development. In the end, it has to be approved by the customer.
Then, our QC inspectors check the products during and after production. We always share our final inspection report with our customers (with photos and many details about the testing plan).
Yes, we have a class 100,000 clean room on site because:
- Some of the products we assemble & test are destined for food contact, or for direct skin contact, so cleanliness in general is a good thing.
- As part of our risk analysis, we identified contamination by foreign particles a low-probability but high-severity occurence, so this is part of the preventive measures we suggest to some of our customers, depending on the product they make.
- It also instills in our employees the sense that respect of the customers’ product is very important, and that’s invaluable.
- The use of a clean room for certain assemblies is only one way to keep products free of contamination. We do many other things, too. For example, our preventive maintenance plan includes regular cleaning of air duct filters.
You can see our clean room in action in this video.
Warehousing, fulfillment, shipping
Yes. Our facility is currently over 8,000 square meters, including and we can devote up to 4,000 square meters for warehousing.
Yes, sure. We have an import & export license, and we have shipping specialists in our team. In some cases we work with a local freight forwarder, and in some cases we book space directly with the airlines.
Yes. We do this for some of our customers. It makes sense in some cases (long lead times acceptable, small and light packages). The IT system we use to manage dropshipping can be connected to your Amazon/eBay account (among others).
