The most trusted source of electronic component market intelligence
The most trusted source of electronic component market intelligence
Any principled sourcing manager, if asked, should raise Ethical Sourcing to be a top priority. It is one of those things that makes obvious sense from a human condition perspective but has not yet been used as a differentiator by…
Professor Hans Rosling is an interesting fellow. In his documentary Don’t Panic: How to End Poverty in 15 Years, which details the United Nations’ plan to end poverty in 15 years, he describes two paths to economic prosperity while improving…
The problem of identifying suppliers with a high risk of failure is becoming more serious as talks of interest rate hikes and free trade agreement dissolution become more common. While this blog considers suppliers in an electronics supply chain, the…
Analyze financial health to prevent catastrophic risk in your supply chain With increasing occurrences of disturbing events, such as companies going bankrupt, how to predict and prevent the catastrophic risk becomes one of the most important considerations of executives and…
In this article, I summarize some points from a lecture that I gave at Hong Kong University in 2014; it drew on a blog I wrote in 2013. I repeat some of the ideas from that blog here because I…
I am surprised by the number of supply chain and purchasing professionals that use the terms Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Strategic Sourcing as excuse for inaction. Don’t misunderstand me. I believe in total cost and in business strategy.…
When we assess a new client’s spending against market pricing, we usually see a distribution of prices made up of overlapping distributions. The profile suggests three distributions. The first is a fairly tight distribution of good pricing positioned where half…
Is there such a thing as an ideal purchasing professional and, if so, what traits do they possess? I believe there is such an ideal – I have met several of them. In my work with price and organizational benchmarking,…
Since my company, Lytica Inc., introduced analytics based price prediction for electronic components, many major EMS and OEM companies have saved millions of dollars by applying this technology to their materials spending. As with the disruptive technologies described by Clayton…
I have been absent from the blog scene for the past few months because I have been working in China with an LED light bulb manufacturer. This is an exciting, fast-paced, high growth industry under intense pressure for cost improvement…