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Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains?
madax asks: "Well..yeah..I am doing some graduate level research in identifying choke points in the electronics supply chain, trying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry, critical processes owned by maybe a select few players and potential information distortion mechanisms that could be used by a few select players in the supply chain to disrupt the entire industry. Can anyone help me by pointing to interesting examples from your experience?"
Can anyone give me guidance on which factories I should blow up in south-east Asia in order to have the maximum impact upon the American economy?
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...there were a choke point in the supply of really boring "Ask Slahsdot" posts. They are here to entertain us, you know, not to inform some hapless poster...
Oh, and FP
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The biggest area of concern is shipping. Take a look at the effects the recent longshoremen strike on the West Coast of the US. Plants closed, or started laying off workers. And this was only after 10 or so days of not getting goods.
"You can just send it by plane, or the East Coast." Not really a valid answer, because everyone else thought of it too.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Which "few years ago"? This happens every couple of years in the memory industry, in a pattern that has been in place for a quarter century:
- New expensive memory technology is invented.
- Companies pour millions (today, billions) of dollars into chip fabs for the new technology.
- Memory prices rise to pay for the fabs, until...
- All the fabs go online, there's a huge glut of memory, and prices plummet.
The only thing that's new are the newbies who believe that the cycle they're in is the only cycle...Will never strike in the electronic supply chain.
:)
The way I see it, its all about business. To inacurately quote star wars, "The tighter your grasp, the more planets will slip between your fingers". How it relates to this is that if one or two key players try to control the crucial supply, there will be always several smaller guys who will think "hey, i can do it better". And they will do their own thing, fscking up the "overly powerful players".
Just like when a Dark Operating System dominated the desktops, a small but elite operating system began to strike from hidden bases, slowly but surely scoring greater and greater victories against the Dominant Overlord of Operating Systems...The battle continues!
Off track, sorry, right, what i mean is, there's a lot of keen poor people out there who dont like being poor. Those keen folk keep their eyes peeled out for an opurtunity to stop being poor. Key points, weak links in supply chains, areas with little competition are factors which attract new players like lattes attract programers.
Should an established player in a supply chain attempt something shift and/or underhanded, those keen little guys will jump right in to try to get a piece of the apple pie. (refer starwars example above hahha)
Once again, sorry for a long-ass, overdrawn, poorly spelt post but I hope at least some part of it makes sense!
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A Wise man say, only fools buy RAM right after an earthquake in Taiwan. King.
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trying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry,
What is critical changes over time. Yesterday's abundant resource can become tomorow's rate-limiting commodity.
For example, at the moment the industry seems to be stalled fighting over access to the limited world supply of something called "customers".
-- MarkusQ
Sole source parts are always a bad thing to have, but if they are the normal jellybean parts (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc.) you can usually work around and find an adequate substitute in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand programmable parts tend to have unique code- that can't easily (or quickly) be transferred from one part to another.
A case in point from my own experience about 2.5 years ago- flash memory had a huge upswing in demand- I believe it was from cell-phones. It was so lucrative, that Atmel switched its fabs over to producing lots of flash memory, and putting us microcontroller users on allocation- we went from a 6 week lead time on production quantities to a 6 *month* lead time in a matter of weeks, and even then, they wouldn't guarantee us parts- it was more like 6 months to get on the list to maybe get parts. Microcontroller code doesn't port nearly as easily as higher level code- you tend to have to use every last resource.
This caused a good number of manufacturers to biased against Atmel- they definitely have their good points, but if you can't get them, they're useless. Unless you're a really big company, it is hard to get continuity of supply agreements. I know that even now (working for a really big company) I hesitate to specify Atmel micros.
This sounds like someone just trying to start up another conspiracy theory. SHEESH! A one having been in the electronics industry for over 20 years...GET A LIFE!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Big earthquake in Kobe several years ago affected shipments of semiconductor molding compound out of nearby Osaka. This causes big problems for many semiconductor manufacturers as most of the world gets their compounds from here.
A couple of years back during the telecom boom (ahh those were the days...) Beryillium Copper Alloy used in semiconductor leadframes became a really scarce commodity.
Loudspeaker prices can fluctuate wildly depending on the supply of cobalt and other rare-earths used in making magnets. The key supply points are volatile African nations where revolution affects production.
Follow the raw materials!
The Electronics Supply Chain chokes you!
Although you're right, I think the original poster was referring to the incident a year or two back where a rather serious earthquake in Taiwan took out one of the factorys that produce the wafers which are used to make most kinds of memory chips. If I remember right there are very, very few factorys that produce them... you can probably count them on one hand. But I don't think it really caused an actual shortage in ram chips, the market always over-reacts and prices fluctuate wildly (in this case they went up significatnly for 5 or 6 months, until the factory was repaired).
Reinard
Um...probably not a CS graduate student. Maybe an MBA going to focus on Supply Chain in the tech industry?
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A couple of years ago we had huge problems getting tantalum capacitors, in any package (surf or through-hole). Lead times went from weeks to months. Like others have said, it fluctuates. What was hard to find one day becomes no big deal months later. It was, of course, toughest when the industry was at its peak -- more product being built means fewer parts available.
Alternate question: Can anyone give me guidance on which schools graduate lazy shits like this? I can sell the list to people who want to pick up a few degrees who don't/can't do real coursework.
I am not sure but I think it involves a bunch of d20's and beer. Lots and Lots of beer.
Perhaps the moderator didn't realize that your response was to the meta-question posed by the original question ... ie: why should ./ readers do lazy students' work for them. :-)
You do homework for Slashdot!
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Yeah, if you say anything even slightly negative you get modded a troll. Moderator's today are so humourless. People really should look at posting history before marking someone a troll, and it should be reserved for real idiots, not borderline cases, or anyone making a critisism.
I think it is a valid point, though. The editors should be looking for questions that prevoke a lively debate. That's what slashdot is for - hundreds of opiniated nerds who think they know best fighting it out - not, as you say, to help them get their homework done. They should be asking questions that in essence, have no answers, not something you could get an answer on whith some applied googling. I think as editors they are missing the point. But even just from a nerdy point of view, who could find a question like this interesting?
Oh well. Thanks for the support anyways.
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And in Jan. 1995, the Kobe earthquake in Japan took out the factory that makes the black plastic used to encase the memory chips, driving prices up. It's all happened before!
I think you missed the point again. Of course prices fluctuate. They go up and down, for reason you mentioned in your earlier post. However the point here is (ie the topic of this discussion is) to find instances where the supply chain of electronics is easily disrupted because there are just a very few suppliers for certain materials or products, NOT because of the reasons you listed above, but because of reasons of this supply chain being interrupted. And as such your example of the Kobe earthquake is fully valid, but the reasons you posted earlier don't really pertain to this. And of course all this has happened before, but remember we are looking for examples of these things that already happened as opposed to making things up. And secondly, just because something happened already doesn't in any way make less worthy to discuss.
Reinard
Give my IBM rep a call and ask him why it took so long to get the new IBM xSeries 345 servers in stock.
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increase in prices some years ago. The interesting part of the whole story was that no one could ever confirm where this resin factory was, and at some point there was speculation that the factories and the fires were completely made up. It was, I think, a classic example of supply chain manipulation at a time when prices were plummeting. It's amazing what can be done when you put your mind to it. Was it Einstein that said "imagination is more powerful than knowledge".
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
identifying choke points in the electronics supply chain, trying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry, critical processes owned by maybe a select few players and potential information distortion mechanisms that could be used by a few select players in the supply chain to disrupt the entire industry.
Call me a cynical old fool, but I find this HIGHLY suspicious, especially given the current geo-polical situation.
"Experts" said it would take 3 years to resume a production line. The fact is that it's pretty hard to manufacture, fine-tune, characterize and ship such a very pure compound. As a result, most IC companies stated reserving their resin allocation to their most profitable IC lines. It became precarious to purchase low-cost TTL circuits.
Guess what? Experts were wrong, as usual! Sumitomo had a new line back in production after a few months. Worldwide shortage was averted. Radio Shack kept selling these 74xx TTLs. Wew.
Lesson learned but never applied: Never depend on a producer that manufactures most of the worldwide supply of anything in only one location.
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