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Ian White

wrote:
since they transferred over to this new system, the whole thing seems
to have fallen apart - for example, I've run them out of capacitors
several times this year with over a month's lead time on replacement
stock ... and then you find that they've run out of the alternative as
well !

It probably isn't their fault. The RoHS directive has thrown the
component industry's JIT manufacturing and delivery processes into
chaos, so there are gaps where certain components just aren't being
made.

Oh, come on! RoHS has been on the cards for some time. Anyone quoting
it is using it as a convenient excuse for their own cock-ups (like a
blinkered "It will never happen", or "I don't need to worry about it"
attitude), rather than a real reason.

What you say is true of some manufacturers and end users of electronic
components, but it's largely *not* true of the distributors in between.

The distributors can only sell what they get, and most of the RoHS
problems are upstream at the manufacturers.

For the past several years I have been placing the same regular order
for about 100 different kinds of components, and have watched this
problem develop. If I thought the distributors were to blame, then
believe me, I wouldn't hesitate to say so; but there's very little real
evidence for that.

The major UK component distributors are nobody's fools. They have been
planning for RoHS for years, because they knew they'd have hundreds of
thousands of different stock codes to change. All things considered,
most of them have handled their end of the problem quite well. It is
largely the manufacturers who have let them down by unpredictably late
deliveries.

The underlying reason is that electronic components are a global market,
but the RoHS changeover is taking several years to roll around the
world. Predictably, the USA is the last to change, so the ongoing demand
for the old-style components has tempted some manufacturers to keep
production lines running far longer than they should. In some cases they
have left themselves insufficient time to make a smooth changeover, so
production has stopped altogether.

The distributors have seen all this coming, but it's a true chaos
problem - there is no way to predict exactly which components it would
affect.

--
Ian White