Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1483130
28 SMT007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2022 cient supply, the right components aren't in the right places at the right times. Pains of fluc- tuations in supply chain include: • Tied up working capital • Time and resources spent searching for inventory • Increased shipping costs due to erratic purchasing • Amplified price volatility • Environmental and financial waste • False demand signals that artificially increase production Building the Solution In 2001, IPC launched EMExcess. Ulti- mately, the program failed, due in part to the lack of balance between buyers. Everyone was willing to offload their excess inventory, but no one wanted to take the risk of using someone else's excess. e current supply chain environment is quite different from previous market cycles. is old idea was made new again at IPC APEX EXPO 2022. At the annual conference, I met with Steve Pudles, former chairman of IPC, an IPC board member for 22 years, and currently CEO of Zentech. Seeing our company's abil- ity to make component search more accessible led to a suggestion from Pudles: a peer-to-peer marketplace where companies could directly trade inventory with each other. is idea began to draw various supporters from all over. With help from IPC, we began organizing roundtables of EMS company exec- utives to discuss the problem of component shortages and excess materials. More than 75 EMS companies were represented in the dis- cussions, and they collectively expressed a renewed interest in building a private mar- ketplace for OEMs and EMS providers. "By involving so many stakeholders in open, round- table discussions, early in the process, we were able to address concerns and build consensus around what is fair," said Mark Wolfe, IPC's executive EMS advisor. StockCQ was born. Today, it is a global, searchable database with hundreds of thousands of unique part num- bers. e nearly 100 participating companies are qualified before their inventory is listed to ensure the community is exclusively OEM and EMS companies. Dozens of matches are made each week between sellers and buyers of com- ponents. It is expected that buyers will still always pre- fer authorized distribution channels over aer- market trading. But in the "new normal" of sup- ply chain volatility, buyers are happy to know they have yet another resource where they can trade parts with companies they can trust. e program is working toward streamlin- ing the transactions and incorporating the StockCQ search into a buyer's normal work- flows. For example, during the RFQ process, a buyer who cannot find a part through their pri- mary channels can instantly search our data- base inventory via QuoteCQ. CalcuQuote's ability to search components and understand the use case of an electronic components buyer paired with IPC's ability to bring the industry together for solving prob- lems makes a digital marketplace a viable solu- tion to today's supply chain challenges. SMT007 Chintan Sutaria is CEO of CalcuQuote. Chintan Sutaria