Completely hopeless distributors these days - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2021, 11:01:47 am
content: Q: "Do you have any 32768Hz SMT crystals?"A: "Is that the part number? I cant find anything for it. Thanks"XXXXXInside Sales ExecutiveFuture Electronics EMEA

author: gamalot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2021, 11:13:57 am
content: "Founded in 1968, Future Electronics is a worldwide leader in electronic components distribution, and is recognized as one of the most respected and innovative companies in the industry today."

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2021, 11:19:23 am
content: Google:32768Hz=> About 155,000 results.Google:32.768KHz=> About 1,330,000 results.Your salesdroid obviously didn't understand S.I. prefixes, and from the above statistics, I estimate less than 12% probability of a favorable outcome if you try again with a fresh salesdroid!

author: Kerlin
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 03:35:50 am
content: I often have this conversation with our local slack Australian distributors."I would like to order twenty of part no 12345""We don't have any at the moment, but we can get them in three weeks"HEY distributors note -The reason that you can make a markup is because you keep stock.That is how you make your living eh? its called offering customer service which is big thing in America.It used to be that having a distributorship was an excuse for making a living, NOT SINCE TWENTY YEARS AGO.When you don't keep stock then I do often order it on the net too and often get direct it to me quicker than you can.I also have used overseas buyers/mailers to beat distributors.

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 06:00:33 am
content: The basic problem is that most distis can't tell if X is a resistor, or thisand most don't employ even a single person who can. It's a scandal. They add zero value.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 06:39:24 am
content: Why aren't you telling them what part you want instead of asking what they have? Future has tons of 32.768kHz crystal offerings.The question is one salespeople will ignore. They aren't dumb, it's just that they ignore tire kickers and wasting their time finding you a part that you haven't defined or bothered to search for a manufacturer and part number.The crystal - what package, what load capacitance?Usual process is you give them your BOM and they will quote, including making substitutes if they don't have the same brand.

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 08:20:00 am
content: Tyre kickers? I am a five digit a year customer.The problem is that there are many part numbers for similar parts and only a tiny % of them actually exist in the market. That's why one needs to work thisfrom the disti endand you needthemto tell you what they carry.BOM?? Let's say it is a new design. If you are a fresh out of college kid, you will design in all sorts of fancy parts which don't exist, and good luck with that approach. The way to do electronic design is to know which parts are popular and cheap and multi sourced and use those.For xtals, there are premium price parts (Kyocera etc, say $0.30 3k+) and chinese no-name parts (say $0.06 3k+). But even Kyocera will list 100 part numbers for a very similar part. Most of these won't actually exist - because nobody ever bought them. They are just numbers in a data sheet.like I say, that's why one needs to work thisfrom the disti endand you needthemto tell you what they carry. This used to be possible, until about 20 years ago.Nowadays, a good way is to select using mouser.com. They have a great website and as a result I use them a lot. Big dely charges under £50 so I always buy at least £50. And their stock levels indicate which parts are popular. But for production they cost too much, and the variants which they carry are not always ones which are moving in volume, so one has to go to a disti. If you bought production from mouser you would pay 1.5x to 2x more.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 12:49:50 pm
content: So what do you actually expect, for the sales rep to list you all those 100 parts nicely tabulated, showing relevant data to help you choose, taking them a week worth of full time work to compile?Oh wait, the distributors already did that work and came up with parametric searches. The sales reps went through the parts they carryonce, put the data into a database publicly accessible through their website so you can do exactly what you wantwithoutcontacting the sales rep personally.

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 04:36:49 pm
content: I am expecting the sales rep to search their database and tell me which 32k smt xtals they have in stock or which are normally popular lines.None of the big distis have customer-accessible databases AFAIK. The second tier distis like Mouser, Digikey, Farnell, etc have, but one doesn't buy production volumes from these (unless desperate).

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 06:55:03 pm
content: I went toFuture Electronic's websitetyped in "32.768" and In Stock, for 13 hits.If you think about, expecting a distributor to have EE-level knowledge is being unrealistic.Why would a reasonable engineer work there, you would die of boredom and the pay is surely not great.The disti's all seem to use expensive software that attempts to translate part numbers, give you alternates. It doesn't work that great with passives, and it knows nothing about popularity.For "popular" parts, I sort by qty in stock- but this assumes the disti's buyers know wtf they are bringing in, and sometimes they are bringing in some Frankenstein part that one customer must be buying or a manufacturer talked them into carrying, and sure enough it's discontinued in a few months. Such a waste.

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 09, 2021, 10:12:29 pm
content: @peter-h:What do you expect? Technical front-end staff for this kind of thing?Don't expect champagne service on a beer budget (and then order at alibaba afterwards).I've worked in (franchised!) semiconductor distribution for many years, and I can assure you that it runs very competently when it comes tokey customer support.Call-in customers are a side show, which you've experienced, and are supposed to go to a website somewhere to find the products.If you want the full spectrum of application engineering and sales support, you'll need to make yourself attractive. What does this mean? Turnover or interesting projects with a potential.That's the way of the world.

author: thm_w
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 12:25:04 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on July 09, 2021, 06:55:03 pm25 hits, their data entry is terriblehttps://www.futureelectronics.com/search?selectedTab=products&q=crystals%3AstockLevel-asc%3Acategory%3Acrystals%3Afeature-crystals-OperatingFrequencyNom%3A32768kHz%3Afeature-crystals-OperatingFrequencyNom%3A32.768kHz%3Afeature-crystals-OperatingFrequencyNom%3A32.768Hz%3AinStockFlag%3Atrue&text=crystals#"Sir our 32kHz crystal is not selling, why is that.." meanwhile the thing is listed as 32Hz.

author: rcbuck
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 02:12:05 am
content: I went to their website and typed 32.768kHZ into search box. Then selected "In Stock". It turned up 8 items with over 210,000 parts in stock. They have slightly more than 1,000,000 parts on order. Apparently Abracon is the only manufacturer of 32.768kHz crystals that they stock.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 07:05:22 am
content: Quote from: peter-h on July 09, 2021, 04:36:49 pmDon't know about you but my impression is that for prototyping and low volumes, you go for Mouser, DK and so on; they have quite acceptable parametric searches helping you design. Then with larger volumes, you'd communicate directly withmanufacturers, no? Cutting the middle men.It seems you have found some "better than Mouser" distributor who doesn't serve their customers by neither offering parametric search nor doing the same thing manually, though. Well, isn't the solution obvious, just don't use them?

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 07:51:23 am
content: One cannot "go direct" until volumes are huge - 100k or a million plus.That's why distributors exist.That Future website appears to be Future in the US.Yes; Abracon seems to be taking over the crystal scene. They have just bought AEL Crystals in the UK, which used to be a good company, selling chinese crystals for far less than the big brands. This will drive up prices massively

author: nali
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 08:37:04 am
content: Didn't you have a whinge a while ago on the same subject? Yes, here is ithttps://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/distributors-are-so-thick-nowadays/msg3077330/#msg3077330QuoteYou may be surprised to find the industry has changed a bit in 30yrsDistributors have hundreds of thousands of line items and use part numbers, deal with it!There are a few other manufacturers of 32.768kHz xtals, mainly Japanese e.g. Seiko/Epson, Kyocera, Citizen which is not too surprising considering their main use really.

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 08:58:06 am
content: "hundreds of thousands of line items and use part numbers, deal with it"You miss the point completely.Try it with resistors.For example 2k2 0603 1% will have at least 10 and probably nearer to 100 part numbers.Of these, probably just a few % actually exist, and most of them will be say £0.01 each, while the "right price" is around £0.001.The bottom line is that distributors have nobody these days who knows anything about components. I wonder what their "staff training" involves?I would have added my post to that old thread but could not find it.

author: TMM
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 09:01:51 am
content: Quote from: Kerlin on July 09, 2021, 03:35:50 amThis. If i'm ordering things at work, if the local distro is only a little bit more I'll still give them some business even are just backordering it, as I get the benefit of dealing with someone local for warranty. If their markup is huge and the items aren't in stock I'll go around them.For private stuff I'll just grey import - my private time isn't worth nearly as much $, happy for it to come via the slow boat and then attempt to fix it myself instead of sending it overseas for warranty (if warranty is even honoured by grey importing).Quote from: peter-h on July 10, 2021, 08:58:06 amThis is pretty much a given in this day and age.I would say the vast majority of customers buying 0603 resistors have done their research and know exactly what they are looking for. They will seek out the cheapest distributor who stocks the product with the specifications they need. This is different to say selling a wifi router or a laptop computer where are significant percentage of customers won't know what they need without some assistance. Even in the latter case there exists a market where there is little to no sales support. The computer store I go to looks like a 3rd world warehouse, cardboard boxes and crap everywhere, their counter is a folding trestle table, half the employees can barely speak english, but I go there because I know exactly what I want and they have it in stock for the cheapest price. I wouldn't ever send non tech-savvy friends/family there however, I'd just direct them to Dell where they are going to pay 50-100% more but get the service they need.If you're a distributor and you're paying for all your salespersons to be EE-educated, some other distributor is going to undercut you by employing salespersons who don't really know about what they are selling, but can tell you that they can get A qty of B manufacturer C product code D lead time for E price and their computer tells them that X Y and Z products are similar alternatives based on the parameters entered into their distributor database.

author: peter-h
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 11:02:27 am
content: You don't need to be EE-educated to know the basics about components.I've done this with people working for me and it takes very little training. Basically you need somebody with a reasonable brain; they can learn different kinds of resistors in the same way as they could learn different kinds of screws if working for a fastener shop. It is just a willingness to learn a bit about the job one is doing. It makes life a lot more interesting, too. Most people hate their jobs these days and this is a way to make it a lot less tedious. Not a fashionable idea these days, I knowThe resistor example is actually a good one, because a particular P/N, say 10k 0805 1% P/N XXX might be 0.0012 (50k+) one day, and if you reorder that same P/N 6 months later it might be 0.0150. That is about 12x more expensive. I can't tell you why this happens, but it does. The pricing on these very cheap parts just varies pretty randomly. Maybe the distis do this in the hope that the customer won't notice. If you look at say mouser.com, which has a very good clear website, you see these huge wild variations with passives. It makes one wonder who pays 0.015 for a resistor, but clearly some do. Just looked and I see them for 0.003 to 0.153! And the 0.003 is still 3x the price it should be but you have to use another source for that, and it will probably be a Yageo part.If one is building less than say 100+ then one can get everything from Mouser or Digikey, or even Farnell or RS. Well, except pricey stuff like £10 CPUs which will be a lot cheaper from a disti. But for 1k+, no.Distisdomake a nice margin, BTW. I have seen some real volume pricing which big OEMs get. I have a big customer which buys from the same distis I buy from, but in much bigger volumes (probably 100k-1M). Look up the price of a HCNW4503. I buy them 5k-10k, and normally pay about£0.60.Just very rarely I got them for £0.40. Now guess the disti'sbuyprice. I can tell you because I have seen their bottomsellingprice:£0.28! So they buy it for less than this. Even allowing for manufacturer price support, the margins arehuge. If you buy from say Future, Avnet, Arrow (Arrow is pretty well dysfunctional here in the UK), etc, 1k+, they are making at least 50% gross margin.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 11:10:30 am
content: Quote from: peter-h on July 08, 2021, 11:01:47 amWhy would you not just go on their website and navigate to the crystals and select “32.768kHz” and “surface mount” in the parametric search? That shows me they currently carry 108 types, of which 9 are in stock. Took me a minute to do.As nice as it would be to have very salesperson be an engineer, that’s just not realistic: who would go through that education only to work a low paid call center job? If a company did decide to have highly knowledgeable technical people doing sales, then they’re gonna have to pay them high salaries, and that’s going to mean that the product prices are high. (Or, like many do, that those staff are reserved for highly profitable huge-volume customers. As in, millions and millions per year, if not per month!)

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 11:16:12 am
content: Quote from: peter-h on July 10, 2021, 11:02:27 amAnyone with enough brains to become competent at this is also smart enough to get bored with it, and WILL tire of it fairly quickly. You’ll get a few years out of them, tops.You gotta understand that curiosity (an underlying feature of people who have a true “willingness to learn” and find life “interesting”) needsongoingfeeding. It is indeed easy to get such people up to speed, but they require real advancement (not just the hollow promises of it that so many employers give) and new challenges if you want to hold onto them. Sales does not offer this. (I know this firsthand.)

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 11:17:21 am
content: The type of service via phone where someone plows through a parts list for you is long gone; admittedly, it was much easier when you had 5~10 suppliers. Nowadays either you have a disty FAE that will do some of this for you or you do it yourself via their website - with the FAE, just keep in mind they will be balancing their suggestions across their various preferred suppliers, so everyone is kept happy in the supply chain.For a five figure customer dealing with a corporate disty, the customer service team is indeed instructed to not waste their time with vague questions like these, especially from an out of the blue telephone call. However, aproperly trainedcustomer service agent would instead respond in a bit more useful way such as orienting you to navigate their website to search for what you need - but somehow I imagine this would not go down well with many folks ("I can browse the internet just fine, thank you very much!") with the ensuing disconnect tone.Another aspect that seasoned customer service agents usually keep in mind is liability: I have seen folks being burned due to a single letter on the part number suffix that rendered the design inoperable or non-compliant in some way, therefore everything has to be put in writing with the information provided matching 1:1 to whatever they have on their database. You may think this is too stupid, but it does happen.All in all, times have changed and the burden of specifying a part is left to the designer - it certainly erodes the value added of a disty but it surely scales much better.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 11:31:48 am
content: But selecting a suitable resistoris not trivial. You are the designer, only you know what the design needs. A sales rep being an expert onallelectronic components is a ridiculous requirement.Yes, they could easily have 3-month crash course on basics so they could understand very basics like Ohm's law but then what? They would recommend you parts that are not suitable for your application anyway. At best, they would do the same as the parametric search already does.No, it's best you as a designer know how to design, and sales reps as sales specialists know how to communicate to the manufacturers, how to negotiate prices, arrange shipping and so on. None of this requires EE expertise.

author: Vovk_Z
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 03:11:14 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on July 09, 2021, 06:39:24 am+1. Since some time several years ago, when I stated that there isn't now any EE-knowledgeable sale-person (that all are retired or else), and I started to have some experience - I started to find and say the exact part number as it is seen in that exact shop.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 10, 2021, 03:53:25 pm
content: Seeing you don't have enough volume for serious discussions with manufacturers directly, have you tried asking for a quote from DK or Mouser, or have you just dismissed them as second-tier suppliers not suitable for mid volume manufacturing without even trying? I.e., what makes you think Future Electronics is significantly better for your volumes?Designing very low cost (race to the bottom) products is hard and requires direct co-operation with manufacturers and careful control of the supply chain.Are you sure you can't pay for the premium of Mouser/DK?

author: armandine2
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2021, 09:20:00 am
content: Many a slip tween cup and lip - Mouser (UK) checkout drop-down list for County, no South Yorkshire.

author: armandine2
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2021, 05:32:08 pm
content: I was going to say this in Metrology but I think it is a reflection on distributors at heart:I'm thinking of the Calibration sheetsyou get with equipment - they don't seem to get proof read - Excel programming mistakes and basic descriptive errors, I've had in the past. I'm expecting a delivery this week and a flawless calibration sheet will be an improvement.

author: bombledmonk
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2021, 10:00:56 pm
content: All the talk about training staff and ordering liability made me think about this article.https://www.edn.com/a-serious-case-of-component-overload/

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2021, 01:58:10 am
content: Quote from: bombledmonk on July 14, 2021, 10:00:56 pmWow, that was a crazy story. The guy was probably fired faster than he could say "resistor".

author: DrG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2021, 08:12:02 pm
content: I don't understand what all the agita is about. When we order, we fill out one of these and mail it in.Then we wait until it arrives COD, pay for it and that all - what's the problem?edit: This was just a joke, I found it stuck in a 1977 Z80 manual today and I laughed because back in the 80s that is how I placed an order - and I only did that a few times.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2021, 10:18:10 pm
content: Both Peter-H and the rest of you is right. Asking for the most usual part is good practice, most times you select the part before you design your PCB, and just picking a part from Digikey is not always the right approach. I did ask similar questions from sales rep., it was a hit and miss, based on how prepared they were.You ask the sales rep, because he has access to order history, their cost price, stock level nd so on, not because you are clueless, or lonely or trying to make friends.And no, if you can buy a full reel, you dont buy from Mouser, why would you. I've seen reel of reputable 0402 that was 25 times cheaper to buy though other distributor than Mouser or Digikey.

author: cortex_m0
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 16, 2021, 12:27:34 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on July 15, 2021, 10:18:10 pmAsking for a popular part that is similar to a proposed part can be useful.These sorts of interactions with distributor/sales types can be useful, but primarily for ICs, transformers, or other components that are difficult to substitute. I'm not going to waste my time or theirs debating which 32.768kHz crystal or 2.2uH wirewound inductor is the right one, because there are probably 20 parts I could pick that would be adequate.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 16, 2021, 01:23:31 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on July 09, 2021, 06:55:03 pmGood engineers have a lot of boring tasks are part of their work. Bad engineers are those who don't do due diligence on the boring tasks. I have seen it many times, especially with documentation.I design electronics circuits from prototyping to manufacturing and do firmware. I would guess that 80% of my work is perspiration and 20% is inspiration.Also, from my experience here in Australia most of the distributors are generally quite good and provide value-add. In particular companies that have excellent support, such as like Arrow. Also suppliers with excellent FAEs like uBlox and Wurth.