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Don’t miss chance discoveries

With preparations for the Electronic Component Show complete and the event’s 25 May 2023 date racing closer, now is a good time to explore the benefits of taking time out of your schedule to visit suppliers face-to-face.   Personally, I’ve lost count of the number of exhibitions I’ve attended over the last 35-years. The number one reason I keep going is serendipity. No matter how much I think I know about a technology or supplier, I always learn something new that is valuable to me.   One of the obvious reasons for these chance discoveries is the rate of technology…

A world no one wants to maintain

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…

What price a battery?

Calling any readers with intimate knowledge of the full EV battery supply chain. I need your advice.   I have a saying ‘show me the incentive and I’ll show you the future’. Well around the world, governments are pushing people to switch to electric vehicles with a combination of legal and financial incentives, so it will happen.   I’ve always assumed that governments green flag these futuristic societal changes by simply giving what they think is sufficient notice for the market to develop, deploy and scale the required technologies. The timeframe to scale the EV move appears to be about…

2023: year of the digital twin and API

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…

Sidestepping the demographic pyramid

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…

Plug-and-play comes of age

Thanks to a unique set of circumstances, there is a single day when I judge the accomplishments of the electronics industry over the previous year: Christmas day. On that day, as if by magic, electronic products appear on the living room floor. The time frame to enable them is immediate. The userbase comprises demanding children. Finally, any form of meaningful technical support is non-existent. This year the challenge was an app-controlled toy and this is how things went. Connect phone to WiFi: check. Find correct app on store and download: check. Register app using facial recognition: check. Enable Bluetooth on…