Special orders don’t upset us…
by Brian Foster
Henry Ford once said that he would give you any color car you wanted… as long as it was black. Well, I’d like to think we are a little more accommodating that old Mr. Ford. I was recently contacted by a customer that needed an RS-232 to RS-485 converter. No problem there… we have dozens of them. The problem was that they wanted 1.7 K Ohm biasing instead of our standard 1.2K Ohm. They also wanted the converter preconfigured to 4-Wire mode. To top it off, they needed their own logo and model number on it. In this world of lean manufacturing and just in time delivery, you would think that a request like this would fall on deaf ears unless thousands of units were involved. Not so at B+B. We actually love this type of work. We quoted a good price for 50 pieces. Since we were already set up to make changes, our engineering fee was modest… just enough to cover a circuit board spin, label design, and testing.
Product customization has always been core to B+B SmartWorx. Over the years, we have provided custom data communications products to a multitude of customers in virtually every market, including point of sale, oil and gas, weighing and measuring, industrial automation, military, and many more.
With engineering teams based in the United States and Europe as well as our Ottawa, Illinois USA manufacturing facility, we are uniquely positioned to provide low quantity custom designs quickly. Our US manufacturing makes it economical to do low quantity builds. In most cases, we can provide a different connector, pin-out, or other variation with little or no engineering charge and quantities as low as fifty pieces. It doesn’t stop there; we do most of our own CE and FCC compliance testing. For the tests we can’t perform ourselves, we have long established relationships with outside testing labs. You can rest assured that any custom product we make for you will have the same rugged certifications as our standard offerings. We can even dual list with UL.
So, if you need a data connectivity device modified for your unique needs, don’t hesitate to ask. Just fill out our custom product request form and one of our sales engineers will get back to you immediately.
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