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Supply Chain Snafu

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Where and how do you find the parts needed to build your hardware? Selling Floppy Emu on a small scale has introduced me to the difficulties of managing a supply chain, and I’ve discovered it’s more difficult than it looks. Doing it wrong means higher costs, more risk, and a danger of running out of key parts at the wrong time. Due to my own poor planning, Floppy Emu has been stuck at “out of stock” for far too long, and I can’t even say for certain when it will be back.

Choosing a vendor from whom to buy parts seems like it should be easy: just use a search engine like Octopart to find the vendor with the lowest price. Sadly it’s not that simple. Some guy on eBay may have the lowest price, but how can I know if his parts are good quality, or if they’re recycled, relabeled, or even counterfeit? Is the savings enough to be worth the risk? And then there are “overstock” vendors like Arrow, Avnet, and Verical, who often have very good prices but require minimum orders of 100+ parts. Are they worth it?

Even if it’s clear which vendor is best for a specific part, it becomes less clear when all the parts are considered together. Floppy Emu is built from about 15 different types of parts, and if I ordered each one from a different vendor, the combined shipping costs from all those vendors would kill me. It’s a balancing act, and it’s often necessary to buy a part from a vendor whose price isn’t the best, so I can combine it with other parts in the same order from that vendor.

Mapping all this out is a pain, but at least it only needs to be done once, right? Wrong. The vendor prices are constantly changing, and less commonly the minimum order sizes change as well. So every time I go to order more parts, I have to start the analysis over again.

I struggle the most with determining how many parts to order. Virtually every vendor has a sliding price scale, where the per-part cost decreases as the number of parts ordered goes up. So there’s an incentive to make orders for large numbers of parts to drive down the average cost, but there’s also a risk. If I order 100 ATMEGA1284 microcontrollers, and then interest in Floppy Emu dries up, I could be left with $1000 worth of useless chips sitting on a shelf. But if I order them 10 at a time, I’ll not only be paying more per chip, I’ll also be reordering nearly every week and risking running out of parts if demand temporarily spikes up.

Out of Stock

My current problems are due to Floppy Emu’s LCD display. In mid-January I thought I had two boxes of LCDs remaining, when in reality I only had one. When I discovered the truth, I only had about six LCDs left. I placed an order for more LCDs on January 29, from the same Chinese vendor I’d used in the past. But then Chinese New Year hit, and nothing happened for a week. The package finally shipped on February 6. Meanwhile, I ran out of LCDs on February 8 and put Floppy Emu into “out of stock” status.

My last order from this vendor took 10 days to arrive from China, so I expected the new LCDs to appear around February 16. But that day passed with nothing in my mailbox, nor the next, nor the next. Time ticked by. As I waited, I accumulated enough Floppy Emu back orders so that the new supply of LCDs would already be nearly exhausted by the time it arrived, so I placed a second order for even more LCDs.

When I checked back on the first order, I saw the vendor was now quoting 25 to 30 working days for delivery. What?! That’s like a month and a half! I’m not sure if this was a change in policy, or the 10-day delivery time I had earlier was just an outlier, but they were now giving me an estimated delivery date of March 7-15. Somehow the second LCD order was estimated to arrive earlier, on February 28 to March 6, despite being ordered three weeks after the first LCDs and being shipped by the same method. And there’s no tracking info on either shipment, so there’s nothing to do but wait.

 

 

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8 Comments so far

  1. Uniserver - February 25th, 2014 1:25 am

    Just think how it would be if you had to build an entire mainboard.

    and think if you had to do it in 1990. With no internet.

    think of the long distance telephone bills.
    and not to mention back then one had to pay 10 to 20 thousand dollars
    to have a PCB design made up.

  2. Eric - February 25th, 2014 5:29 am

    I think that most of us that have spent years scouring Craigslist/eBay/newspapers for the most functional/cosmetic/cheap 68K Macintosh systems have had to develop the patience of Job to keep our heads straight – even if we are occasionally spoiled by the likes of Unilever and his ability to turn around a leaky-capped logic board faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle”. So while, some of us are eager to get our hands on a Floppy Emu, we appreciate that what you’ve created, and can empathize with the effort it has taken to create it AND re-create it for us.

    And given all of the tech pies that my fingers are in, I can tell you that you are not alone in falling victim to the Chinese New Year.

    Hopefully the appearance on the RetroMacCast will keep interest high enough to make the effort worthwhile without overwhelming you with work.

  3. Uniserver - February 26th, 2014 12:06 am

    lol unilever gotta love auto correct 🙂

    yeah i am waiting on some things from china my self!
    witch has yet to arrive!
    TDK ceramic caps and 34 to 50 pin scsi adaptors — first time pcb run for the Mac Portable.

  4. Steve Chamberlin - February 28th, 2014 6:52 pm

    LCDs have arrived! Unexpectedly, they came in a DHL package and required a signature for delivery. Inside was a whole pile of LCD screens just thrown in a bag, then wrapped in bubble wrap. 🙁 I don’t see anything broken, but it’s not the best example of packaging I’ve ever encountered. At least the month-long wait is finally over.

  5. Steve Chamberlin - February 28th, 2014 9:10 pm

    Huh, this is fishy. I ordered 30 LCDs which supposedly shipped on February 6. Then I later ordered 30 more LCDs from the same supplier on February 18. Today I received a single box with 60 LCDs in it, so they were obviously all shipped at the same time. Looks like they actually sat on my first order for at least 12 days after sending me the “shipped” notice. Grrr.

  6. drelephant - March 17th, 2014 9:19 pm

    Yes I often suspect chinese ebay sellers that mark items as “shipped” within minutes of my order are telling porky pies…

  7. Harold - June 27th, 2015 2:01 am

    @drelephant, I agree with you!

  8. Mary - October 5th, 2015 4:39 am

    @drelephant, me too!

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