[Big Bad Bob]

On 05/15/11 10:25, Engineer so wittily quipped:
On May 10, 4:09 am, Big Bad BobBigBadBob-at-mrp3-
wrote:
On 05/09/11 21:36, flipper so wittily quipped:

but at the end of the day
if there are 200 man hours in a chinese amp, ( 5 men working for a
week ), the cost of wages is $128, and if materials in chinese prices
are also $128, then total cost of production = $256,and if you double
that for the profit made my whoever owns the chinese company, maybe
the Chinese Communist Party, then the export price might be $512.

All ridiculous assumptions, not to mention the cost of doing business
is more than simply COGS.

my point was that the design would determine how many man hours you
need. there are really a LOT of variables in the cost of manufacturing
something. mfg engineers get paid HUGE bucks to figure out inexpensive
ways of building something (without compromising quality even). But if
you can have it all done via automation, so much the better. Then the
assembly production costs can become "COGS" eh? Final assembly and test
would take very little time for a reasonably experienced tech.

Bob, I like your comments... there's a core truth here and it would be
nice to see someone try to bring this type of manufacturing back to
North America, in particular back to Ontario, Canada, where I promote
such a manufacturing revival in my professional engineering volunteer
work. I actually retired as VP Engineering from a profitable Toronto
company that still manufactures specialized instrumentation here and
sells it world wide.
One minor quibble... manufacturing engineers (ME's) here are not paid
"HUGE bucks", they get about the same as other salaried professionals,
and it's taxed at rates up to some 46% on the last dollar (very few of
them!), with most ME's at about the 39% marginal rate.

ouch on the tax rates!

seriously, though, in cases where the engineer regularly saves millions
of dollars per year in manufacturing costs, he will be very well
compensated (or else someone ELSE will get his services). Or at least
an M.E. will earn several more times the salary of someone on an
assembly line. 'Huge Bucks' is somewhat relative. Point taken anyway.

kudos on the VP eng position, by the way. that's pretty good.