Welcome to Supply Chain Reaction

What is a chain reaction? Dictionary.com defines chain reaction as: a series of events in which each event is the result of the one preceding and the cause of the one following. I couldn’t think of a better way to describe the electronics supply chain right now, ergo, you are reading our latest blog, “Supply Chain Reaction.”

What was once a relatively straightforward industry, one that saw minimal change from year to year, the electronics supply chain has since boomed into an ever shifting challenge to any company and every company with its hand in electronics. This is thanks in large part to all of the environmental compliance regulations that have come about in the last two years. The European Union’s Restriction on Hazardous Substances (EU RoHS), the mother of them all, took affect last July and was really the start of what I think will be a chain of regulations that will change the world of electronics as we know it – a supply-chain chain reaction, if you will.

Since EU RoHS, the supply chain has seen an ever more challenging hazardous substances law come about, China RoHS, and the comparisons to its predecessor can’t be ignored (although they do vary greatly, see “China RoHS: Ready or not, it’s here”). 

Even if the pain of compliance – product number changes, exemptions, finding leaded parts, locating English translations – may make you think otherwise sometimes, we’re fortunate to be at the ground level on this. Understanding of and compliance with EU RoHS will make understanding of and compliance with China RoHS that much easier because you’ve been through one of these regulations already, and so on, and so on, as more of these regulations come down the pike.

And there are more coming down the pike! Ones that will make China RoHS look like child’s play.

In this blog, I’ll try to make the journey a little less painful. I’ll also post along the way about other happenings in the supply chain – like RFID, inventory levels, globalization and distribution – that affect the way the electronics industry does business.

Tune back in to Supply Chain Reaction often and join the conversation by blogging back with your own comments.

Suzanne Deffree
News Editor, Electronic News
 

Side note: I originally planned on calling this blog simply “Chain Reaction,” that was until I ran a Google search and realized an old Keanu Reeves/Morgan Freeman movie by that title. Ironically, the movie focuses on two researchers in a green alternative energy project. While I will be talking about green initiatives in this blog, I certainly wouldn’t want anything I wrote to be associated with this 1996 flick. Why? Because any movie that sees Keanu playing an experimental physicist is not one I want to be linked with.