Benchmark Electronics' design service teams integrate with your staff to provide the design expertise you need, and help ensure the overall success of your entire project.

Benchmark Design Services can engage with a variety of engineering activities to support our customers. They include:

• Product Development
• Test Development
• New Product Introduction
• Continuation Engineering

Although the Benchmark development processes are structured to make an electronic product concept a volume production solution, typically Benchmark client OEMs retain key technical responsibilities for their products. An EMS industry leading feature of Benchmark Electronics is the flexibility of Benchmark engineering resources to augment our OEM engineering partners to make both corporations successful.

This process involves examination of your resource availability and technology requirements and then use Benchmark Design Services expertise and resources to fill any gaps.

Benchmark has developed the tools, processes and communication schemes to be compatible with your needs such that technical and project level communication is tight, leading to correct and timely decisions and successful project execution.  More detailed description of Benchmark's Design Services can be found here.

Most Product Development Projects include Hardware, Software and Mechanical Design Elements. A Project Plan designed to carry out a development project results in a list of tasks and linked resources often described by a Gantt Chart. The Gantt Chart shows the order of tasks, critical paths and relationships. Another representation of this same plan is a PERT Chart. A PERT Chart shows the tasks linked together as a chain of events.

Examination of this chain provides a model for understanding the Engagement Strategies used by Benchmark and its Engineering Customers.

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Each link of the chain represents a tasks which is essential to the integrity of the entire project. Some tasks are more critical in nature a some are essential to the very existence of the customers business and as such must be considered a “Core Task” Some links are peripheral or represent parallel activities and although essential are candidates for outsource.

As the project manager plans his project and builds a project team he finds that the links in his project chain can be defined as:

• Key:  A link representing a task which is on the critical path of the project and on which ultimate success of the project depends. This link may be a junction tying other links together and as such requires an individual with strong communication skills and the ability to see an coordinate the “Big Picture”.
• Missing:  This is a task that has no suitable resource available to accept the assignment.
• Weak:  This link is represented by a resource that although available does not have the perceived strength, skills or time required of the task.
• Misplaced:  This link is assigned to a resource although totally qualified is needed in another area or project.

Engaging Benchmark Design Services to augment your project teams and solve issues related to weak, missing or misplaced links can ensure the integrity of your entire project.  All that is required is to generate a description or statement of work for the candidate or outsourceable links and share these tasks with Benchmark. Benchmark will search its resource base and propose a solution.

Engagement using these precepts will result in a trust based win/win relationship.