How the Right Procurement Partners Can Reduce Your Time to Market – and Why That’s Important

Sourcing electronics components is more challenging than ever today. Due to short product lifecycles, reducing your time to market for in-demand electronics is critical to maintaining profitability.

Choosing the right supply chain partners to source components – including hard-to-find semiconductor chips – is an essential piece of the puzzle. But there's more to choosing the right procurement partners than just the ability to obtain the parts you need.

A comprehensive, integrated supply chain with traceability, accountability, and robust technology solutions can reduce stress on your team, reduce your time-to-market, and help you create happier customers.

M2M Connections through EDI or API Solutions Keep Your Supply Chain Moving

Machine-to-machine (M2M) connections eliminate human workers from the data entry process for inventory tracking, shipping, and part procurement. This increases efficiency and accuracy, which can hasten your time to market and set you apart from competitors.

Application Program Interfaces, or APIs, deliver a streamlined approach to order tracking, product information, support, and other key elements of your supply chain. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions similarly streamline communications between multiple companies, seamlessly transferring information including, but not limited to:

• Purchase orders
• Invoices
• Change requests

Again, by reducing or eliminating the possibility of human error, you can improve accuracy and timeliness and streamline workflows. Whether API or EDI solutions – or a combination of the two – work best for your company will depend on the functionality you need and the platform your supply chain partners prefer.

Integrated Mobile List Management Tools Help Streamline Processes

From creating a quote to procuring required parts, MyLists, a sophisticated list management tool, puts it all at your fingertips. This robust list management tool offers Bill of Materials (BOM) management, including DigiKey and third-party line items to consolidate your materials, live pricing, item availability, and quoting capabilities.

Plus, the Assembly Controls feature can multiply your list by any quantity without changing the original, making it easy to place production run orders and vastly improving time to market.

Attrition calculations account for planned overages to replace lost or damaged components so that your project can stay on budget and finish on time, without worries that you'll be missing components.

Part Tracing Minimizes Lost Inventory

Products often disappear in the supply chain, whether they get lost in shipping or misplaced in a warehouse. Cut Tape strips from DigiKey include a universal Part Tracing ID that makes it easy to trace important information about a product and its role in your project.

These strips show the manufacturer part number, DigiKey's unique part number, customer reference, the manufacturer, a description of the part, the product's origin date and lot, and its country of origination. Additionally, you'll see the sales order number, invoice number, purchase order number, and the product's unique line item number.

Having this information available means, you won't lose track of cut tape products once removed from their bag, which means your merchandise can move through the production process faster, with no hold-ups due to lost parts or shortages.

Outsourced Design Services Reduce Time to Market for New Products

Innovating new products can mean even more time-to-market challenges. An agile approach - being willing to test, fail, and repeat - often works when you're breaking new technological ground. But Design Service Providers who've "been there, done that" can dramatically shorten the learning curve. They understand the common challenges that crop up during research, development, and design and have discovered replicable ways to meet these challenges.

Of course, innovation means covering new ground, which means your design team is bound to face unique issues exclusive to your project. But a design team accustomed to executing various projects with proven systems and processes can dramatically improve your time to market even when you're creating something never even imagined – much less produced – before.

How to Reduce Time to Market with the Right Supply Chain Partners

Many obstacles can slow your time to market or even prevent your product from hitting store shelves or customers' front steps. Inventory errors, tracking challenges, and even roadblocks during the design phase can put your project behind schedule.

Reducing your time to market to beat out your competitors, improve your cash flow, and create happier customers is essential. DigiKey has the tools, technology, and team you need to reduce your time-to-market and stay at the head of your industry.