Electronics Contract Manufacturing
Increase in network-wide factory utilisation
Reduction in unplanned production delays
About
MacroFab runs a cloud manufacturing platform that routes PCB assembly orders from hardware companies to a network of 100+ partner factories across North America. As order volume scaled, matching each job to the right factory by capacity, lead time, and landed cost outgrew what planners could solve by hand. We built a real-time routing optimiser that turns that matching problem into a scheduling engine.
Industry
Electronics Contract Manufacturing
Company size
100 – 500 employees
Founded
2013
The Company
A digital platform sitting on top of a very analog industry
MacroFab operates North America's largest technology platform for electronics manufacturing, connecting hardware companies to a network of more than 100 partner factories spanning prototype runs through high-volume PCBA production. Each factory carries different equipment, capacity, certifications, and lead times.
As order volume grew, the business needed every job routed to the factory that could deliver it fastest and cheapest without breaching quality or capacity constraints — a matching problem with far more variables than any planning team could hold in their head order by order.
The challenge
Order-to-factory matching had outgrown manual planning
Production planners were assigning jobs to factories based on relationships and rough capacity estimates rather than live data. Two failure modes resulted: high-demand factories ran over capacity and slipped delivery dates, while comparable capacity sat idle elsewhere in the network because no one had visibility into it in the moment a job needed placing.
Changeover sequencing within each factory compounded the problem — jobs arrived in whatever order they were quoted, not in the sequence that minimised setup and re-tooling time across a facility's queue.
The Solution
A Mixed Integer Programming router with live factory telemetry
We built a real-time order-routing optimiser using Gurobi, connected to a live factory-capacity feed so the model always solves against current, not stale, capacity. Given every open order, the model simultaneously solves for lowest landed cost, fastest feasible delivery, and minimum changeover time within each factory's queue, subject to hard constraints on certification, equipment compatibility, and committed capacity.
Planners see the recommended routing through a dashboard, can override for relationship or strategic reasons, and the system automatically recalculates downstream impact of any override — so a manual change to one order's routing doesn't silently break the plan for the rest of the queue.
The Results
21% more network capacity without adding a single factory
Network-wide utilisation rose 21% in the first two quarters — capacity that already existed but had been invisible to planners routing by memory. Unplanned production delays fell 18% as jobs were matched to factories that could actually deliver on the committed date rather than the factory a planner happened to think of first.
Changeover time within individual factory queues fell 14% through better job sequencing, and planning effort dropped enough that the team redirected its time toward partner development rather than day-to-day order placement.
The optimiser did not replace our planners' judgment on partner relationships — it just stopped us leaving capacity on the table because nobody happened to think of the right factory that day.
VP Manufacturing Operations, MacroFab
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