US manufacturers lose an estimated $450 billion annually to excess inventory. The best way to reduce inventory write downs is preventing excess in the first place. Here are three tips to help you avoid and deal with excess inventory.
With the growing popularity of SMT technology, through-hole technology is taking up less real estate on a PCB assembly. But through-hole pins are still a necessary for many boards, and they still need to be soldered. While this process can be cumbersome, many manufacturers have turned to selective soldering as a precise and cost effective way to solder through-hole technology.
Over 1 million electronic components go obsolete every year. We've all been hurt by obsolescence during our careers, isn't it time to be proactive?
In recent years, semiconductor packaging has evolved with an increased demand for greater functionality, smaller size, and added utility. A modern PCBA design has two main methods for mounting components onto a PCB: Through-Hole Mounting and Surface Mounting.
Everyone talks about systems, but how relevant are they to helping you actually cut cost? Here are some software-driven systems to look for when choosing a contract manufacturer.
Reliability experts contend that roughly 30 percent of PCBA failures are due to contamination of the bare PCB, and only an estimated 2 percent of contaminated PCBs are sent back to the fabricator for re-cleaning. This is largely because of a basic misunderstanding of the correlation between PCB contaminants and product failure.
Component obsolesence is a much bigger threat than most realize. Here are the little-known reasons you keep getting surprised, and why you need SiliconExpert to mitigate the risk.
4 Ways to Eliminate Component Late Deliveries
Late deliveries from component suppliers are one the main sources of production delays, and their specific causes are endless. Causes can depend on the type of product being procured, the complexity and scope of a supply chain, and other wildcard variables such as economic and natural disasters. This article, however, focuses on four identifiable variables a contract manufacturer or OEM can control: loose internal processes, reactive processes, poor vendor management, and poor communication.
A new Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study titled “The Shifting Economics of Global Manufacturing: An Analysis of the Changing Cost Competitiveness of the World’s Top 25 Export Economies” ranks Mexico as less expensive than China. Even more significantly, it notes that China’s edge in manufacturing cost compared with the U.S. is now less than 5 percent and will continue to shrink as China's Third Plenum reforms are implemented.
