Any company producing goods that rely on commodity parts, such as phoenix connectors, power supplies, and general panel building supplies knows that the situation for product availability can be dire. So dire that we’ve seen parts go from thousands in stock to backordered overnight. We’ve been engaged in panel building / contract assembly since the inception of our company, and even before then when we would do it on the side or even for ourselves. 

Over the course of this year we’ve engaged with multiple customers looking for solutions to this exact problem, or hoping that we’ve been able to maintain stock on critical components (surprise! we haven’t been able to either). We have however developed a process for taking existing projects and optimizing out unnecessary components, and replacing these critical components with PCB mounted ones. 

Unlike many panel building houses, Big Industries is able to design, test, and implement custom PCBs for our customers and their projects. These custom PCBs are more reliable, easier to use, easier to document, and faster to assemble than traditional components. Take for example our recent customer SMS Direct. They came to us with a panel full of McMaster brand screw terminals for the wiring of their control panels, and in a few iterations we’ve completely replaced their unlabeled, hard to support assembly, with their own custom PCB setups that are able to be delivered on-time and under budget.