Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Customers Need it All

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...In the very near future we are going to have to sell much more than just bare boards alone (or assembly alone, or even design alone) to be successful. We must sell the entire package if we want to give customers what they want. And many want it now!

Some of you are laughing at this bleedingly obvious statement. Those chuckling have been doing this for years--the Hughes, the Hunters and the Murriettas of the world--providing customers with a complete solution. For that, I commend you. You're already way ahead of the power curve and it will serve you well, very well indeed.

But for the rest of you just providing customers with bare boards, I would urge you to begin looking into the possibility of providing customers with a complete solution or "total concept" as we used to call it at ASI, or an  "integrated solution" as Murrietta Circuits puts it.

This concept is the wave of the future. It's what customers will want and what we'll have to deliver to stay at the forefront of our industry.

An engineer at a large product development company recently told me that if his vendors could not provide him with a complete solution, he would find a company that could. He's becoming disenchanted with companies that create a ccomplete solution by partnering with other companies, saying, “This just is not cutting it for his company any longer.”

He went on to say, “We want vendors who can give us what we want, when we want it, and produced by that company alone; there's too much of a risk in buying products from a vendor who uses a system patched together from various partners to provide that complete solution.”

I was surprised at this because I've been advocating partnering with design houses and assembly companies for years. This engineer told me this is no longer an acceptable solution--now they want a true, complete solution provided by one company.

This worries me. I mean, I can see what he’s talking about, but I worry that this will be very difficult to acheive, at least right now, for many companies. I still think that a partnership approach will work for a while, and I still recommend it for the time being.

Later, I talked to an engineer at an OEM who told me the same story. He had a number of vendors who were partnering with small assembly companies to provide prototype and proof-of-design orders. He warned me that the next step was going to be dealing exclusively with companies who “own” every part of this supply chain. But this guy went further and told me something very encouraging: He said, with a certain degree of certainty, that his company will always use a North American vendor when looking for a provider of a complete schematic-to-assembly solution. This is, of course, a good thing. I also think that it should be a serious incentive to those shops  thinking of getting into the business of providing a complete solution.

Of course, the process is easier said than done. I would encourage you to look into providing a complete solution if you are not already doing so. Despite what the two gentlemen mentioned here told me, I would also encourage you to look for a strong partner in other business areas in order to provide a complete solution to your customers, but it can be challenging to find the right partners. Quoting a complete package, including design, fabrication, and assembly, can also be quite scary. My job is to keep readers abreast of what's coming and advise the best ways to prepare for the future. You don’t have to be some kind of fortune teller to see that offering complete solutions to customers is a pretty safe prediction--one that we should all heed. It’s only common sense.