Until recently, sustainability and “greening” the supply chain largely meant keeping up with regional, national, and global regulations on carbon emissions, hazardous materials, and recycling. {complink 7426|Gartner Inc.}, though, is now seeing a major shift away from regulator-driven sustainability models to total energy efficiency priorities. During a Webinar this week, Hiranya Fernando, a Gartner senior…
If there's one thing that throws any well laid manufacturing and supply chain plan into havoc it's the uncertainty surrounding the point at which competing devices deserve increased resources and production capacity. The electronics supply chain is facing such a challenge now in the jostling for consumer attention by manufacturers of e-readers and tablet PCs.…
My recent blog about manufacturing trends in Central and Eastern Europe sparked a couple of comments about Škoda Auto, a Czech Republic-based carmaker and wholly-owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group. I thought it deserved some follow-up attention. Škoda, with about 110 years of history under its hood, has essentially recreated itself this past decade. It…
These last few months, many OEMs, including Nokia and Research in Motion, have been smacked with lower-than-expected income and revenues as consumer and government spending slowed and end-users gravitated towards a limited set of innovative device platforms. If recent news coming out of Amsterdam carries any weight, we soon may be adding {complink 4269|Koninklijke Philips…
One of the fun parts about following the high-tech supply chain is trend tracking. Sometimes, spotting a trend comes from personal observation, a sudden insight that puts the bigger electronics picture into focus. Many times, other people more expert than me provide much-needed perspective. In this vein, I'll give credit to International Data Corp. In…
Before you condemn Europeans protesting the severe austerity measures the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank wants to impose on Greece and Spain, step into their shoes for a moment, please. I bring a unique perspective to the dialogue and want to share with you my understanding of events on the continent. You…
Here's an intuitively odd idea: Small doses of bad news may be good for sales. That's the theory coming out of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Tel Aviv University. It sounds weird, but a recent study undertaken by the two institutions found that smatterings of mildly negative information — a so-called “blemishing effect” —…
{complink 38|Acer Inc.}, once a high-flying PC vendor, is licking its wounds — again. After what seems to be a serious misreading of market demand and equally disconcerting missteps in supply chain planning, the company is slashing its full-year tablet shipment target by 60 percent, dumping three million laptops into the European market to clear…
The Cloud. If you haven't heard about this yet, you've probably been walking around in a fog. The ubiquitous buzzword is even taking on new lives and branching out to other areas. To date, we have cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud engineering, and Intercloud, the interconnected global cloud of clouds. In the last week, we've…