Head to Head

Jon Barrett, editor. Electronics Sourcing:

Occasionally, electronics suppliers tell the editorial and advertising sales teams at Electronics Sourcing, quite bluntly, that buyers are of little or no interest to them. I find this a fascinating position.

I can appreciate that some non-commodity components need significant design effort during a product's development phase but surely, once a part is selected, the long term relationship between supplier and customer then relies on a mutually beneficial partnership with the purchasing department. To ignore this seems like madness. Imagine a scenario where a manufacturer's engineering team and supplier's design support department work together to ensure the right component is selected from a purely technical perspective. If the purchasing department is considered the poor relation, critical issues such as price, availability and long-term obsolescence could easily be swept aside. In the worst case scenario, a component is specified, production starts, leadtime increases, availability evaporates and prices rise. Not ideal I wonder how often purchasing sits side-by-side with design during concept, design, development, NPI and production. I fear it is not as common as I would like it to be. Maybe some readers can set my mind at rest. So, with one of the UK's largest electronics stockholdings, plus dedicated design support teams, Electronics Sourcing asked Anglia Components the impossible question: who comes first, design or purchasing?

Our philosophy is that the relationship centres on the Anglia account manager, who is here to develop partnerships with all the stakeholders in the company: purchasing, design, production and quality. We would never attempt to approach a design engineer with a view to trying to design a component into a product without first having convinced the Purchasing Department of our credentials, and that would include considerations such as RoHS compliance, obsolescence, logistics etc. Major customers would in most cases want to perform a full audit of our system. So in that respect, yes, our first level of interface is with purchasing.

Once Anglia has established this chain of communication, our field applications engineers will work with the design engineers to find the right parts for their design. We place a great emphasis on this aspect of the customer partnership, ensuring that we only recruit FAEs with a sound technical background, well-developed communications skills and excellent customer awareness. Then we make sure that they are fully trained on the product ranges they're supporting, and that this product knowledge is continually kept up to date by our manufacturers. But our technical support doesn't end with design-in we also get involved in production engineering issues such as solderability, packaging, labelling and so on, and with the QA Department on reliability issues.

There are many ways in which we can help our customers, even with products that might have been in production for some time: for instance we can look at the range of components they are buying for different projects, and help them to standardise on certain package styles or lead pitches - thus helping to minimise the customer's own stock inventory and to capitalise on economies of scale. This is effectively a hidden value, which the Purchasing Department doesn't necessarily see reflected in the price, but can nevertheless cut costs within the customer's organisation and make the purchaser's job easier.