That's the thing that makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it work better for everyone involved, including the manufacturer, if they come back with a "here's exactly how we interpreted your spec and what materials we're using, including cases where we picked something you left unconstrained", and a corresponding price for using those materials, with the understanding that if you want different materials you get a different price, before they do any manufacturing whatsoever?
But a whole lot of manufacturing relies on the OEM not just for the production but also some of the engineering. They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.
A friend of mine worked for a major vacuum company that has 3 well-known lines. The very high end line is manufactured in the USA. The mid range line is fully designed here but manufactured there.
The low end line they basically tell a Chinese OEM what it should look like and certain parts of it and let the OEM fill in the blanks. OEM makes vacuums for other brands too, they know what size wires to use where, why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium?
OP is making something fundamentally different than what exists in some ways. It’s a lamp, but obviously it has some considerations other lamps don’t.
Also hardware (as OP pointed out) has long development cycles during which prices can actually fluctuate significantly. You don’t want to lock in cost plus pricing or you’ll end up buying components from their sister company at astronomical prices. You might not have time to source 100 different parts from Chinese OEMs yourself. Etc.
The whole thing is a complex guessing game. I’ve only manufactured approximately the simplest objects imaginable (stuff like gaskets and cups) and found it to be far more complex than I thought it would be. Manageable but something like a lamp I could see being a lot of unexpected work. I did not see, for instance, how much effort I had to put in speccing out the packaging for simple objects but then I found myself repacking things here.
And yet, every single time I've seen reports of people having trouble with manufacturing, this was one of the problems. Someone presumably had to figure out all the little parts, so send the result of the figuring out before manufacturing begins!
I'm not trying to oversimplify, here. There are constraints this doesn't account for; for instance, getting a spec written in English might be an added expense. But getting whatever was written doesn't seem unreasonable...
> why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium
But someone had to spec it out, and it seems like it'd help everyone involved to communicate that spec, even if it's just filed in a drawer somewhere.
So you’d have to spend electrical engineering salary on checking over every little wire. That adds to cost and timeline.
Part of what you use the OEM for is so that they have to spec it out, not your expensive engineers, and get something lower cost and faster.
And frankly, a lot of things you just don’t expect that you have to tell them. Like the wire length issue in this particular post, you would expect them to just get that at least approximately correct.
You don’t know what you don’t know and it’s easy to evaluate in hindsight, but what you’re not seeing in this post is all the things they just did correctly with no prompting. There were surely very many, and each of them saved a good amount of time and money.