Electronic Design & Manufacturing: China, Taiwan & Colombia

We optimize around best-value Chinese components, and, when it helps save on tariffs,

we can also do final assembly in our facility in Colombia.

We don’t just consult, we deliver reliable products following our

tried and tested electronic product development-to-manufacturing process.

Titoma helps Western companies with the complete design and manufacturing of custom electronic products. We focus on wirelessly connected embedded electronics for small and medium-sized B2B firms.

How titoma started

Titoma is the fast way to say Time To Market. It was founded by Case Engelen in 2001, after he ran the Taiwan branch of Well Design, a leading Dutch industrial design and mechanical engineering firm, for 5 years.

In the early years, Titoma worked with Taiwanese and Chinese ODM factories to do the majority of the product development, but as hard as we worked on keeping communication smooth, that approach had a lot of problems, the first being that, more often than not, it would take ages.

Case Engelen, Titoma CEO

How new product development shaped our path

When we finally realized that new product development will never be a priority for a factory, we started designing all mechanical parts, electronic hardware, and firmware in-house. We practice a particular flavor of DFM which is DFCM (design for China manufacturing).

Here you can read more about my China manufacturing lessons.

What we discovered is that to get to market FAST, you need to prevent unnecessary iterations. Our "Magic Sauce" is to avoid delays by involving key Chinese (component) suppliers in the design stage very early on.

We engineer and manufacture embedded electronic products, often around STM32, Bluetooth from Nordic and WiFi from ESP. Many are wirelessly connected, Internet Of Things (IoT) and we also make industrial equipment.

Why clients come to us for electronic design for china manufacturing

Most of our clients know that to be competitive in electronics, you need to be in China: components are the lowest cost in the world, and because nearly ALL components can be found there, NPI (getting the product into manufacturing) is faster than anywhere else.

Many have tried dealing with the manufacturers in China themselves, but eventually got tired of the endless disconnect between their design team and the factory in China. Now they leave everything hardware to us, so they can focus on sales, customers and software.

Time To Market : China Speed

We take full advantage of China speed by optimizing mechanical and electronic design for China components and mold making, right from the start. This eliminates a LOT of unnecessary delays. We do mold making and EVT/DVT/PVT pilot runs in China, so that any issues can be dealt with quickly, as all vendors are within a one-hour drive of the factory.

No ODM

We are not an ODM, which means that we will not work for your competitors, and we don’t hold you hostage either. Our clients pay a reasonable NRE and get to own the complete design package, including firmware and molds.

Portable Design

Tariffs and wars make the world unpredictable, so it’s important to stay flexible. Once a design is completely stable and certified, we can continue manufacturing in China, or ship kits of components to Taiwan or Colombia: doing SMT and final assembly in Colombia will make a product qualify as Made in Colombia, minimizing US import tariffs.

When the assembly in Colombia is stabilized, we can ship the injection molds over to produce the plastic parts in Colombia as well.

Transfer Manufacturing

If you prefer to have final assembly done in Texas or Poland, we can accommodate that as well.

Transferring manufacturing to another country is not as easy as it sounds, and stories abound of multinationals taking 12 to 18 months to get it right. We have been practicing relocalising production since Trump’s first term, so we optimise for Design portability from the start. We have moved 12 products from China to Taiwan, and 6 from China to Colombia.

We have the experience to document, QC and properly package all individual parts, so everything mates perfectly, and nothing gets scratched or goes missing.

IN SHORT

Entrust Titoma with both Design AND Manufacturing, and save yourself a lot of time, aggravation and money.

Titoma vs. factories & consultants, how are we different?

Tier 1 odm factories in china & taiwan: pegatron/wistron/compal..

ODM factories specialize in a certain kind of product, say laptops, for which they make a basic design which they then customize and brand for whomever is interested.

They have many years of experience with their product category, which is great. Development cost and unit cost are likely to be low, and for a complex product this is can be the best way to go. Trying to design an LCD projector or phone from scratch would mean many cycles of trial and error.

A disadvantage is that they just as easily make the same product for your direct competitor, or even their own brand. You do not get to own the design, especially in China this can feel like being taken hostage, losing control of pricing.

Another big issue is that when you’re not a large brand promising 100K units a month in sales, you tend to be low priority, and the process can take a very long time. We ourselves tried working with ODM’s for quite a few years and learned some valuable lessons.

TIER 1 ELECTRONIC MANUFACTURING SERVICES. (EMS): FOXCONN/FLEX/JABIL

OEM factories basically make whatever electronics you ask them to make, and in the last years they have also started to incorporate product development teams. When you start talks with them you tend to meet an awesome set of engineers who really know their stuff.

But these tier 1 factories are really focused on clients who do at least $50 million per year. Upper management tells their underlings that up and coming companies are important, but typically their PM’s work on 3 to 5 clients at the same time, and if HP has a problem there will be little attention for your smaller project.

Every factory has his own P&L responsibility, and so every manager is mostly interested in their own unit’s current sales and profitability. For them putting 30 engineers on an order of 3K pcs is not good for their numbers.

Another issue with the big international firms such as Flex is that they often claim that transition from their American plant to their factory in China will be seamless.

This is unfortunately not the case, transferring a program can take a year. One client said to us recently that they would rather first have Jabil do the DFM in Canada and just accept the higher cost for the pilot run, and once that is done they would transfer manufacturing to their Shenzhen factory to achieve the target cost they needed.

This doesn’t make sense, DFM is not some universal standard, but rather the optimization of a design for 1 particular factory plus importantly the many suppliers of custom parts. If later you move to China you’ll be dealing with a completely different set of vendors, and you will need to all the customization and validation again. Except that at this point your design is likely frozen and certified already, so many options to optimize are gone.

Smaller odm factories in china & taiwan: tens of thousands

One of the most important things in manufacturing is to find a right sized factory, small enough so the boss will show up when you visit them.

Your importance to the factory correlates directly with the speed they will resolve issues. So if you want your emails answered you need a right-sized factory, but the problem is that a factory which gets enthusiastic about a 3,000 pcs order tends to have very limited engineering capability, and while they’re often very willing, communicating with them is not always easy if you don’t master Chinese.

Us/Europe Based Product Design Consultants: Synapse / Lemnos Labs /

High-end electronic design consultancies charge US$ 1 to 3 million per project. Part of this cost is explained by the fact that they fly their $200/hr engineers over to China for months on end to implement the design to the China factory. As with any consultancy, their business model is to sell hours, so getting things done quickly unfortunately is not in their interest.

CHINA MANUFACTURING CONSULTANTS: DRAGON INNOVATION E.A.

The consultants from Dragon are very good, but they expect you to have a mature design which is 95% complete, and they then will help you find a suitable factory and interface with them.

We feel doing DFM (Design For Manufacturing) when you’re already at 95% is way too late to make meaningful adjustments, at that point the vast majority of the design choices have already been made. Changing for a more economical MCU or camera module can easily imply half a year of re-work.

Titoma – the time to market company

To be competitive in electronics you need to use the components and parts of the greater China supply chain. Designing in a vacuum in the West, and then sending over your design to Asia will not help much, because at that point it’s much too late to change active components such as say a camera module.

We select the best value for money components, and generally involve all manufacturers very early on in the design. This avoids endless iterations which will cause you to miss your market window.

Our clients pay a fee for the design and development, and so fully own the IP, and are not locked in. This keeps us very motivated to make sure you’re happy with our service and competitive pricing.

We have some 45 experienced engineers in design centers in Colombia (LatAm) and Taiwan, at arm’s length from China. We do all design and prototyping in-house, so your IP stays protected. We are still small enough that every client will deal directly with our CTO, Leo Manrique, especially convenient for our US clients. Design For Manufacturing is our middle name, we always work for, and in constant collaboration with, the factory.

Video, Colombian Office

Our Taipei office focusses on integrating the electronics with the mechanical housings, our Mandarin speaking Mechanical Engineers discuss mold design directly with the mold makers in China.

Our design fees are very reasonable and we generally quote fixed budgets, so we have zero incentive to drag things on. Quite the contrary, our goal and that of our cluster of partners, is to get to mass manufacturing of your electronics as quickly as possible.

At the same time, Reliability is even more important to us than speed, because, unlike a design firm, we will actually be responsible for any returned products.

We make it our business to fully understand our client’s core technology, once we have developed a first generation product we continue to develop many different permutations and application of that same core principles. We act as our client’s IP custodians and take on only one client per product category.

Getting a new electronic product designed & manufactured reliably requires a lot of time and a lot of expertise.

The big manufacturers are generally not interested enough in small orders to give you that kind of attention, the smaller factories are often eager, but severely lack in engineering talent and communication.

Westerns electronic design consultancies are very good but not cheap, and even though they claim they know a factory in China, in reality they often work very much in isolation. You can then hire China Manufacturing experts to improve DFM, but doing it this late in the process wastes valuable time & resources.

To be fast and cost effective, electronic design needs to be done in Asia, in close cooperation with the factories.

Titoma combines world-class engineering talent on-site with a right sized factory in Taiwan or China.

WHO DO WE WORK WITH?

Titoma partners with established B2B companies who want to focus on sales, and entrust everything hardware to us.
Order quantities range from 200 to 50,000 pcs., as long as the total value of the order is at least US$ 150,000.
We focus on embedded devices using microprocessors such as STM32 or PIC32 and often add wireless connectivity with Bluetooth (Nordic), Wi-Fi (Espressif), RFID, GPS and custom RF.

Sounds like a match? Book a free consult with our Chairman Case Engelen now.

We do our design in our Taiwan and Colombia offices, most manufacturing in China, and some high value & complex production in Taiwan.

With us doing both Design AND Manufacturing…

We save you time, aggravation and quite a bit of money.