Providing strategic advice and market insights for optimizing manufacturing relationships and achieving profitable environmental strategies to clients in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia since 1987.
2011 was a big year for sustainability stories in the tech industry, encompassing the good, the bad, and the “mixed”—from new restrictions on hazardous substance (RoHS recast or REACH) to environmental accidents (most notably Fukushima) to social responsibility (anti-slavery law in California) to new evidence for the profitability of sustainability (financial market boosts). Here’s our take on it. more »
2011’s Biggest Stories for Tech Industry Sustainability
Social Media – Finally Ready for Electronics Manufacturing?
by Beth Dickinson, TFI Marketing Consultant
By now, the benefits of social media for B2C marketing are clear — fostering intense brand loyalty, gaining valuable customer insights, and generating buzz. But in B2B marketing, particularly for electronics manufacturers supporting brand-name customers, it’s been more of a puzzle. What does social media have to offer component distributors, solder-paste makers, and contract manufacturers? Read on — if you look beyond viral videos, Facebook contests, and celebrity Tweets, the answer is “plenty.”
Today companies as varied as Newark, Indium, Creation Technologies, and Brocade are using social media to expand their networks and influence, troubleshoot product and process issues, serve customers, recruit employees and partners, attract business, and support positive brand awareness. more »
New Anti-Slavery Supply Chain Law: Are you ready?
This month we’ve broken the news about California’s Transparency in Supply Chains Act to too many people in the tech industry. The law requires manufacturers and retailers with annual global revenues of >$US100M doing business in California to prominently disclose on their websites their efforts, if any, to ensure that their product supply chains are free from slavery and human trafficking. Given that the law goes into effect January 1st, 2012, more companies should have known about this. more »
FAQ on Electronics Contract Manufacturing in India
Recently, clients have been reprising questions to us about the electronics contract manufacturing industry in India. TFI has been studying the Indian electronics CM industry since the late 1990s, when we introduced a delegation of CEOs from Indian CMs to Silicon Valley executives. Here’s an updated FAQ on the region: more »
Clarity for 2012: Prioritizing Initiatives for Sustainable Profitability
Today’s supply-chain executives are saddled with both traditional business initiatives (make products faster, better, cheaper) and customers’ new insistence on corporate responsibility (workers’ rights, environmental protection, moral supply chains). Throw in the unexpected, such as changeable economic conditions and floods in Thailand that affect the supply chain, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But setting and prioritizing initiatives to meet these challenges can be remarkably quick and reassuring. more »
Supply-Chain Leadership: Gorilla-sized leverage by pint-sized companies
by Anne Feith, TFI Senior Analyst
Few brand-owner companies (OEMs) enjoy the influence of industry giants like HP, Ericsson, or Sony, who can easily convince their large manufacturing suppliers to try something new. Most of our OEM clients are in the mid-size range, where normally it’s a struggle to get large suppliers to accelerate time to market, reduce cost of goods sold, and soften risks through innovative new practices. We recommend these steps for operations executives to maximize their muscle with larger manufacturing suppliers: more »
The Design Engineer’s Brain: Where the Supply Chain Begins
For 25 years we at TFI have been analyzing the electronics industry’s supply chain, from components, to assembling them in-house or outsourcing, to testing and shipping finished products, and to refurbishing and recycling them. This past spring, we examined the start of the supply chain by eliciting from 328 design engineers around the world how they think about the design process.
The top three challenges during the design process are 1) Just not enough time, 2) Incomplete information, and 3) Difficult to compare options and alternatives. more »
e-Waste Recycling’s ‘Wasted’ Logistics Costs
By Jonathan Gilbert, TFI Logistics Consultant
A recent MIT Senseable City Lab project, BackTalk, placed small GPS devices in electronic waste (e-waste) to track where our discarded items go for recycling and disposal. The result was so surprising — uncovering such far distances traveled by the e-waste — that the project is currently exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Given the high carbon footprint and cost of transportation, today’s e-waste recycling infrastructure could be taxing both profits and the environment. We at TFI think there may be a solution. more »
Worth the Wait: Longer-term strategies for contract manufacturers
If you are an executive at an electronics contract or original-design manufacturer and are looking for a quick fix this quarter, read no further. On the other hand, if you’re an electronics executive who’s noticing that the world and industry are changing, and you’re looking for success according to customers’ new “rules,” this blog post is for you. The strategies covered here are longer-term: up to 3 years. more »
Not Just a Pipe Dream: Sustainable Packaging for the Electronics Industry
By Ben Marshall, TFI Environment Researcher
Whenever a product has to be packaged, new materials enter the supply chain stream. Often times in the electronics industry, these materials are plastics, and usually, the most toxic types of plastics – namely polystyrene. But what are the alternatives? Are there any that electronics companies can responsibly use? more »
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