Where have all the components gone?
01 March 2010
It seems every silver lining these days brings a considerable black cloud with it.
I spent a good part of my time at the recent Southern Electronics exhibition talking to members of the contract manufacturing community. The first thing to note was that they, like everyone else I spoke to, and as evidenced by the bustle of the slightly too narrow aisles, thought that Southern Electronics was a vibrant show that boded well for the immediate fortunes of the electronics sector – in southern England, anyway.
In fact many of those CEMs exhibiting, of which there were quite a few, were positively buoyant about prospects. Most had retained all, or at least most, of their staff through the difficulties of 2009 and were now able to offer immediate capacity for their dormant customers.
As always there seems to be a problem and in this case it was repeated by every company I spoke to – the thorny issue of component availability. Because growth in China has been merely checked by the global recession, rather than be knocked back on its heels like the rest of us, it has continued to demand the attentions of the component suppliers. All of a sudden, parts that were assumed to be readily available stock items are now commanding 20 week lead times, which is clearly sufficiently long to add frustration and remove momentum from the recovery.
The contract manufacturers claim that the problem could be smoothed with the right degree of planning. Indeed, if you wanted this particular black cloud to have an additional silver lining, it could be that these long lead times do encourage the levels of commitment that OEMs have been wary of in recent times. Visibility improves for the contract manufacturer. Long-overdue investments in equipment can then be made that benefit the customer by reducing cost. We could be looking at an upward spiral!
The other option is to design out the difficult-to-get components. For all that there is a swings and roundabouts element to what is readily available and what is not (one of the companies I was talking to was even complaining about the lack of chip capacitors for him to get his hands on), and designs should not be compromised unnecessarily, there must be advantages in having a ‘design for procurement’ philosophy in the same way that design for manufacture and design for test are recognised as being of real value and importance. What is more is that many of these CEMs offer this as an additional service and area of expertise that is there to be used by designers within the OEM.
Maybe this is the time when it is worth exploring the capabilities offered by suppliers. I have brushed on the contribution that the CEMs can make, but equally component suppliers and distributors and other third party suppliers can make similarly useful contributions beyond their core function.
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