I recently stumbled across the phrase ‘we’ve built a world no one wants to maintain’. That got me thinking of all the things that are manufactured and bought by eager customers who, as soon as they have purchased them, have little or no interest in maintaining them. Even if people do want to maintain them, they either lack the skills or resources to do it themselves or discover it is increasingly difficult to find someone who will.   Random observations proved my point: paint peeling off window sills, chipped paving stones, rusting bicycles, cracked phone screens, dented vehicle panels, faulty…

I wonder if it’s time to swap ‘just-in-time’ supply chains for ‘efficient and robust’ supply chains. To me, using the JIT descriptor suggests every supply chain process is in perfect lockstep with every other to the nearest minute. That isn’t the case and never will be. Ultimately, someone, somewhere is always ‘holding the baby’. Driving ‘work in progress’ towards zero, for every component on a bill-of-materials, across every process step—from mining raw materials to soldering parts to a PCB—is a laudable goal. Imagine this could be achieved for a moment in time. A second later, some form of geopolitical, financial…

Over recent weeks I’ve had the pleasure of attending a number of engineering exhibitions and working on the production of over thirty Executive Forecast features across the North American and UK editions of Electronics Sourcing. Every conversation and interaction offered a unique perspective of what we can expect in 2023, however some trends emerged. Allow me to expand on two. Firstly, at this phase of the post pandemic reset, the industry is starting to experience, for the first time, what happens when a complex, globalised supply chain comes back online after a shut down. It is true that manufacturers and…