EMS firm Worthington Assembly last week announced a deal to market its EMS services via CircuitHub.

WAI is a small EMS company located in Western Massachusetts. Like many in the sub-$20 million space, WAI’s owners double as its salesmen, and the firm relies heavily on word of mouth (and engineers changing jobs) for prospecting.

CircuitHub developed a universal parts library and is offering that, along with BoM, bare board and assembly quoting. PCD&F did a piece on the company last year.

Chris Denney, WAI’s CTO (and a sometime CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY columnist) explains the partnership here.

Clearly, more opportunities to order boards from a variety of suppliers via a single website are popping up, with the site typically offering free software in order to gain visitors (FabStream, for example, offers use of a PCB CAD tool capable of up to 12 layer boards, and SnapEDA offers simulation).

I would not anticipate larger EMS firms would go this route. But for smaller ones, whose cost of sales would be proportionally high relative to its income if it employed direct outside sales, using app-based vendors could be a creative and low-cost way to find new customers.