Electronics manufacturers are used to harsh cyclical downturns often caused by their reliance on unverified assumptions about industry fundamentals.
Even the biggest chipmakers, OEMs and other leading supply chain players have fallen victims to these myths, many of which sound quite believable and continue to be propagated by some top industry executives.
Bursting any of these unproven, collective beliefs won’t be easy; many of them have been around for so long that they’veVolumetric Efficiency attained an elevated level of respectability and “unquestionable accuracy”, according to Ken Bradley, founder and co-owner of supply chain analytics and pricing intelligence firm Lytica Inc. Bradley, a former chief procurement officer at the now defunct telecommunications equipment vendor Nortel Networks, has focused Lytica on helping electronics industry executives avoid complications arising from these myths, including erroneous pricing assumptions, for example.
Senior procurement executives often believe they are paying optimal pricing for components whereas that’s far from the truth, Bradley said in a previous interview. He expounded on this issue in a recent contribution to Electronics Purchasing Strategies where he noted that unfounded myths – about demand forecasts, for instance – often create “embedded inefficiencies” that can only be dispelled if executives query such assumptions and request supportive facts from suppliers, customers and supply chain partners. (See: Take the Embedded Inefficiencies Testtest is test).
