Pretty much commodity-like "Variable" costs.
The general approach will be the same, but not every step.
Where you get into retooling is that every piece of any sort of machinery that touches any aspect of that motherboard is going to have to be checked to see if its actions are EXACTLY the same. Where its not, it needs to (at best) be reprogrammed or (at worst) completely replaced. This means that if a row of components gets shifted over 1mm, all of the 'pic' heads that install those items need to be reprogrammed, etc.
Since motherboards aren't my thing, I'm going to pick something that seems simple: let's say that a new mounting screw has been added, and this screw happens to be a different size than the rest:
- Change in screw supplier / inventory tracking & control
- Change in a job description ('keeper the new screws')
- Add a new station location on the assembly line
- Add material hander (pull from transporting system into station)
- New power drop to run the new equipment
- (+Check building power)
- A new Vibratory Bowl Feeder (VBF) to supply screw to the line
- A new VBF bow design for orientating the different screw size
- A new VBF supply chute design to deliver it down to the picker
- New power drop to run the new equipment
- (+Check building power)
- New (maybe just updated) 'pic' head for the assember machine
- (+Check to see if the assembler has the free time to add this task)
- New programming for what the assembler's supposed to do with it
- (+Check programming if borrowing pic time; free for other tasks)
- Return material handling (return to transporting system)
- Document all production line changes
- Get safety release certifications for all the changes
- Establish employee training plan
- Conduct employee training
- New QA check
This is just off the cuff; the full checklist will probably be twice as long. After you have this checklist, you can then go and price out each item on it. Overall, I'd SWAG this one little item as probably around $300K by the time you're done.
Since its the P Socket, the procedure's going to be slightly different. You'll need to make sure that the machine to do this task has the right tool to grab the processor...after verifying that the supply racks are okay...and then go into the specifics as to how the two sockets are different and what the machine needs to do in order to do the assembly correctly. Once its all set up, it should run fine and probably not have a significant change in variable costs...but it does still need to be all checked over to be sure.
In general, the thing to remember is that the way that we drive down costs today is through automation, and that while robots do a very good job in these repetitive tasks, even the smallest things throw a spanner into the works and will screw up a line...checking out and being explicit for every single one of these details is where your tooling & retooling costs come from.
-hh
