The concept for 4Cite incubated from a constant need for qualified, extremely talented technical resources to accomplish specific tasks without creating engineering overhead. Early in my career working for a defense company in the Silicon Valley, I was tasked with developing a sophisticated system using a resource pool of subcontractors in various areas located around the country. Our project charter was to take pieces of commercial PC-based position/navigation systems, reduce the software requirement to 2% of the original size, and turn it into an embedded real-time system. With only 6 trips to subcontractors and 2 onsite integration visits by subcontractors, the project successfully launched in 9 months. This was my first inclination that remote resources were a significant and viable alternative to in-house resources.

Before forming 4Cite in 1999, I served as the Electronics Engineering Manager for Danaher Controls, a business segment of Danaher Corporation ($4B). Danaher is one of the premier flow manufacturing companies in the US with growth of 24% annually since inception in the early 1980's. The Danaher Business System (DBS) enticed me as it focused on Design for Manufacture, Assembly, and Test. Never was a design started without a competitor product/patents analysis and goals in terms of cost, manufacturing techniques, testing targets, and risk. The implementation of DBS techniques led the team to frequently beat estimates and competitor costs by 20%-30%.

However, the location of Danaher Controls lacked interest for many technical individuals, since it was isolated from other technical companies. Therefore, with the assistance of the World Wide Web technology boom, I began to form a virtual engineering team extension based on the most talented individuals in various engineering and technical disciplines I had worked with throughout my career. I have a BS in Electrical Engineering, a Masters in Computer Engineering and 12+ years of experience in defense, industrial, environmental, and handheld markets. My education and experience is evenly split between hardware and software. Designs have included PC-based and handheld (PalmOS), but has heavily worked in the embedded market. This background led to a rather diverse and encompassing team.

Eventually, 4Cite developed into a virtual engineering team composed of experts in technical specifications, hardware (digital/analog), software, mechanical, PCB, CAD, injection-molded plastics, ultrasonic welding, sheet metal fabrication, test equipment, EMC/EMI, graphics, electronic manufacturing (SMT/T-H) and semiconductor manufacturing. Areas of experience have included defense, industrial controls, medical devices, PDA, environmental monitoring, hard drive magnetic heads, power distribution, plasma displays, and multimedia/DVD. Ultra-low power battery-operated electronics has become a area of expertise. All of the resources are loosely bound to 4Cite as independent telecommuting consultants with over 8000 hours as a team. Half of the resources have advanced degrees, the combined experience is over 180 years, and several hold patents.

The telecommuting independent consultant aspect is critical to our business model as travel, facilities, and benefits overhead is eliminated. Typically, we operate on a Not-To-Exceed (NTE) price that is the sum of the individual contributors. This allows the client to determine the entire project costs up front, without potential for cost overrun, and usually this cost is similar to the real cost of in-house engineering resources. The difference is the costs are tied to a project and go away when the project is completed, unlike internal resources. Our clients have been pleased with the value, such as one client we helped encompass functionality that costs $125 into a new design that costs $25.

4Cite is now poised to revolutionize traditional engineering through virtual engineering resource techniques. This is happening throughout the country as you are reading this history. Additional resources are being qualified in Hong Kong and India to further increase the cost value of our resources. We look forward to including you on the cutting edge of this new engineering paradigm.

Jonathan T. Dorny, President
4Cite Inc