I used to be a cigarette smoker. Each New Year I resolved to stop smoking, and I’d stash my “last” half-pack of cigarettes deep inside a dark drawer. Months later, when I felt I needed just one cigarette, I’d retrieve the pack and start smoking again. For a long time I tried nicotine-replacement therapies: patches, […]
In view of the COVID-19 disruption and anticipated aftermath in the embedded electronics industry, computer board OEMs face an existential challenge right now: How do they best allocate their resources to satisfy the competing objectives of 1) sustaining existing designs while simultaneously 2) inspiring and capturing the market for new designs? If OEMs spend too […]
Perhaps you’ve heard the phase, “You get what you measure.” This is the reason we set up performance reports that reflect the things we want to achieve. After all, if we’re not measuring it, how can we demonstrate whether or not we’re succeeding? It’s also true that, “You don’t always measure what you get.” This […]
What’s the difference between a customer/supplier relationship and a partnership? In a word: Trust. Sometimes it seems as if no one trusts anyone anymore, and it’s easy to see why. Most people involved in the embedded computing supply chain have a story to tell about some supplier who’s acted in a win–lose way, where it […]
Business leaders don’t like process exceptions, because they’re inefficient and require a lot of special intervention to resolve. They also don’t like to discontinue old product designs that still have a few customers, because these orders help them make their sales targets and avoid customer issues. That makes sense, right? Maybe not as much sense […]
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “true cost” of things. Our leadership team has been working on a particularly large order for more than a year. Since we restarted the production line for this discontinued COTS board several years back, this is the third ad hoc order we’ve accepted. In each of these […]
I’ve recently come back from an exciting two-week road trip, and I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the impact obsolete electronics have on their enterprises. The people I met were knowledgeable, passionate, and in many cases struggling to find a solution or make a business case to remedy their particular obsolescence problem. […]
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