Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1071356
JANUARY 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 27 Put all of those options on your AVL because when you turn those Bills of Materials over to your purchasing folks, more often than not, they're trying to buy to a part number. More and more today, there are different part numbers. Some are just packaging, some might be a 5000-piece reel versus a 10,000- piece reel. Again, others are better- than or equivalent parts. The more the engineer can specify a broader selection of products on the front end, the better chance the purchasing agent is going to match up to something that's going to fit that need. That's just taking the exact need that you have. The more you can work in some flexibility into your design, the better off you're going to be as well if you can accept a little bit wider range on tolerances in some of these parameters. Johnson: I know that a lot of designers work with their design on one monitor and the Digi- Key website up on another as they search for the parts that have the right parameters for their circuit. How do you see Digi-Key improving that decision-making process? Doherty: It's a great question. Part of it I want to make sure that we share too, is we've been fortunate. We think that our suppliers have been as generous as they can be with us because our primary model is to support NPI. Our suppliers appreciate that while they have to support today's demand, they can't cut off tomorrow's next-generation products because that's their future livelihood. Johnson: You're right. Doherty: Our primary model is to support that NPI and design activity. Now, suppliers' MOQs (minimum order quantities) are usually high enough that when we buy the necessary product, we need to support that. There is some additional inventory that supports spot shortages or unanticipated demand from some of our customers, but that's opportunistic. That's not strategic for us, and so our commitment and desire is working with suppliers to have sufficient quantities on the shelf to support those opportunities early in the design stage so that they can prototype and get to preproduction. They can validate the design, and we keep the innovation flowing while their counterparts in purchasing focus on keeping their existing supply chain for their production needs to stay up and running. We're bringing in more inventory. I would challenge anybody to do so, whether they've been able to bring in the amount of inventory in the last two years at the same rate we've brought in. It's astronomical amounts. Being private, we have the ability to do so; we're not measured on terms or financial performance. We don't have Wall Street looking over our shoulders, so we saw some signs of this uptick a little over two years ago and started to aggressively purchase more product. You have physically just as much product as possible available on the shelf. Then ask, "Can we do a better job with our parametrics so that we can compare functions and our users can look and see their BOM, critical parameters, and widen their search to see what parts meet that capability or add more parts to the AVL on the front end?" We value and hope designers continue to trust and have our website up in conjunction as they work on their design. We want those tools, parametrics, and additional content to be there as well so that they can get the flexibility we just alluded to, which makes it easier for the purchasing folks.