Rutronik’s senior manager product marketing standard products and purchasing, Reza Maghdounieh, explains how circuit protection devices protect your wallet and reputation.
Did you know that without noticing, your daily activities can cause your body to charge with up to 10,000V. Even more surprising, discharges below 3,500V will go completely unnoticed. However, just 100V is enough to cause significant damage to sensitive ICs.
Thus, having the right ESD protection is important to protect your company’s money and reputation. Often underestimated, is purchasing professionals’ responsibility when it comes to selecting and purchasing protection components.
Finding the right protection device can be a challenging task for purchasing professionals. In today´s market, there are many solutions and the number of protection parts can be overwhelming. Customer requirements, the speed of innovation, availability, cost, quality and issues beyond a purchaser’s control, such as geopolitical challenges, need consideration. Purchasers who have a distribution partner helping them solve these challenges have an advantage. More than three-quarters of global companies take a systematic and comprehensive approach to getting themselves fit for the future.
The wide range of protection components purchasing professionals can choose from varies depending on the application and the space their engineering department has provided. Purchasers in the automotive segment may be tasked with sourcing protection components for data lines, load-dumps, antenna ESD protection and more, while ensuring the components fulfill the industry’s high requirements. While fuses and circuit breakers might be a solution for some industrial applications, TVS diodes, rectifiers or varistors may offer a solution to ESD protection as well.
More purchasing choice means more potential for cost savings and better availabilities to keep lines running. However, this also means more responsibility for the purchaser who needs to understand the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of protection components. Distributors who offer support to procurement and engineering departments can make sure the customer finds the right balance between technical and budget requirements. This may be through a field sales engineer who supports purchasers and engineers alike and understands the challenges both departments face.
Rutronik’s field sales engineers have a technical understanding, making them an asset to a customer’s design department, while appreciating a component’s cost and availability to also support purchasing departments.
It is important to work with a distributor which can offer qualified personal support, supply a variety of protection products and knows which will best suit a customer’s application. This includes offering well-known manufacturers such as AVX, Vishay and Yageo, plus smaller specialized manufacturers such as Panjit or Diotec, all available at Rutronik.
Since circuit protection is an important topic for manufacturers, it has become an important matter for Rutronik as well. The company sells over 350 million TVS and ESD protection devices annually and also has a circuit protection team at its corporate headquarters whose task it is to provide technical and commercial support to customers. This includes monitoring lead times and prices.
Moreover, the e-commerce platform Rutronik24 is designed to make it easy to order small quantities online in minutes. Rutronik understands the responsibility that comes with being a purchasing professional for protection components and is determined to help customers protect their wallet, board and reputation.