Accelerate from Making to Manufacturing - Building Open Source Hardware - page 210

(Source: Images CC-BY 2.0 SparkFun/Juan Pena)
Figure 12.3 SparkFun's production floor, circa 2012.
This equipment setup had, for the most part, been pieced together over the span of five
years with not one of the equipment purchases being made under any amount of duress,
with the expectation of having it up and running by a specific day. However, it still took
us a long time to get up and running. Modern assembly equipment is far from meeting the
definition of “plug and play.” That all changed when the MaKey MaKey Kickstarter
“blew up.” It was realized that the anticipated demand from assembling so many MaKey
MaKey circuit boards would far exceed SparkFun's existing manufacturing resources. A
decision would have to be made to determine how best to increase production capacity.
The choice was a relatively simple one: find ways to better utilize and maximize the exist-
ing resources or add more resources to better match the upcoming demand. SparkFun had
already been running a fairly lean operation, so the only truly feasible option was to add
new resources.
We made a choice between two possibilities: adding a third shift to operate the as-
sembly machinery or adding new equipment resources that could enable a higher volume
of circuit board assembly with the same available production personnel hours. This ques-