Last week I attended and presented at the IPC International Flex Circuit Conference in Irvine, California. I was also on the organizing committee for this event, so I was glad to see such a great and engaged turnout. I saw many old friends and made many new ones. It was generally comforting to be in a room full of people whose lives were so equally consumed by the same unique and intricate item: The flex circuit.

My presentation dealt with military/aerospace business opportunities for flex circuit manufacturers. I outlined markets for defense electronics, commercial aircraft and Homeland Security and law enforcement. I added a section on organic growth opportunities and finished up with general ways to approach the markets. In my presentation, I included the story of one of the most bizarre things I have ever done in my 32-year PWB career: The 2-8-9 Quoting System.

The 2-8-9 Quoting System was the brainchild of my early-career mentor and was hatched in the late 1980s while he and I were both at a small, privately-held flex circuit shop in Southern California's San Fernando Valley. We decided that we would save time and quote every RFQ that came in with the numbers 2, 8 and 9. We needed only to determine the item's complexity. So, a very simple part would be $2.89 each. A slightly more complex one was $28.90. More complex yet, and it went for $289 each. And, finally, I believe there was one we quoted at $2,890. We did this for one month and saw no significant change in our capture rate.

The point I was making last week at the conference with the sharing of this story is that price was not a primary deciding factor among the consumers we had back then. The buy decision had already been made based on other factors and we needed only to submit a unit price that was within the expected realm. And while I cautioned that price is a very important component in the market today, I proposed that the same holds true for the buy decision: It is made by the consumer based on other factors. Price is merely a result of those other factors.

At this point in my presentation, I was encouraging companies to differentiate themselves from the pack to be positively noticed by the consumer base. The way that a flex circuit manufacturing company can do this is by perfecting the factors that it controls--technologies, efficiencies, business systems and organizational techniques. The primary result of this perfection will be an offering to the marketplace of a profitably competitive price. Price alone--without the perfection of factors--cannot be a differentiator. Anyone who has ever had P&L responsibility for a PWB manufacturing operation will quickly tell you that a company who is selling by adjusting its unit prices to meet the marketplace, without commensurable internal adjustments to compensate, is in a death spiral.