Author Topic: Completely hopeless distributors these days  (Read 4050 times)

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Online peter-hTopic starter

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Completely hopeless distributors these days
« on: July 08, 2021, 11:01:47 am »
Q: "Do you have any 32768Hz SMT crystals?"

A: "Is that the part number? I cant find anything for it. Thanks"

XXXXX
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Future Electronics EMEA

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Offline gamalot

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2021, 11:13:57 am »
"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."  ;D
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Offline Ian.M

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2021, 11:19:23 am »
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!
 

Offline Kerlin

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2021, 03:35:50 am »
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.



« Last Edit: July 09, 2021, 03:42:33 am by Kerlin »
Do you know what the thread is about and are Comprehending what has been said ?
 

Online peter-hTopic starter

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #4 on: July 09, 2021, 06:00:33 am »
The basic problem is that most distis can't tell if X is a resistor, or this



and most don't employ even a single person who can. It's a scandal. They add zero value.
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Offline floobydust

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #5 on: July 09, 2021, 06:39:24 am »
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.
 
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Online peter-hTopic starter

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #6 on: July 09, 2021, 08:20:00 am »
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 this from the disti end and you need them to 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 this from the disti end and you need them to 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.


« Last Edit: July 09, 2021, 08:32:39 am by peter-h »
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Online Siwastaja

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #7 on: July 09, 2021, 12:49:50 pm »
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 carry once, put the data into a database publicly accessible through their website so you can do exactly what you want without contacting the sales rep personally.
 
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Online peter-hTopic starter

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #8 on: July 09, 2021, 04:36:49 pm »
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).
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Offline floobydust

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #9 on: July 09, 2021, 06:55:03 pm »
I went to Future Electronic's website typed 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.

 
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Offline Benta

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #10 on: July 09, 2021, 10:12:29 pm »
@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 to key 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.
 
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Offline thm_w

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« Last Edit: July 10, 2021, 12:27:49 am by thm_w »
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Offline rcbuck

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #12 on: July 10, 2021, 02:12:05 am »
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.
 

Online Siwastaja

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #13 on: July 10, 2021, 07:05:22 am »
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).

Don'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 with manufacturers, 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?
 

Online peter-hTopic starter

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #14 on: July 10, 2021, 07:51:23 am »
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 :)
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Online nali

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #15 on: July 10, 2021, 08:37:04 am »
Didn't you have a whinge a while ago on the same subject? Yes, here is it https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/distributors-are-so-thick-nowadays/msg3077330/#msg3077330

Quote
The good old days of Macro Marketing and their smart girls :) That was almost 30 years ago and it's been doing downhill since.

You may be surprised to find the industry has changed a bit in 30yrs :box: Distributors 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.
 

Online peter-hTopic starter

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #16 on: July 10, 2021, 08:58:06 am »
"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.
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Offline TMM

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #17 on: July 10, 2021, 09:01:51 am »
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.
This. 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).

"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.
This 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.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2021, 09:21:57 am by TMM »
 

Online peter-hTopic starter

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #18 on: July 10, 2021, 11:02:27 am »
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 know :)

The 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.

Distis do make 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's buy price. I can tell you because I have seen their bottom selling price: £0.28! So they buy it for less than this. Even allowing for manufacturer price support, the margins are huge. 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.


« Last Edit: July 10, 2021, 11:06:59 am by peter-h »
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Online tooki

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #19 on: July 10, 2021, 11:10:30 am »
Q: "Do you have any 32768Hz SMT crystals?"

A: "Is that the part number? I cant find anything for it. Thanks"

XXXXX
Inside Sales Executive
Future Electronics EMEA

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Why 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!)
 

Online tooki

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #20 on: July 10, 2021, 11:16:12 am »
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 know :)
Anyone 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”) needs ongoing feeding. 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.)
 
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Offline rsjsouza

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #21 on: July 10, 2021, 11:17:21 am »
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, a properly trained customer 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.
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Online Siwastaja

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #22 on: July 10, 2021, 11:31:48 am »
But selecting a suitable resistor is not trivial. You are the designer, only you know what the design needs. A sales rep being an expert on all electronic 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.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2021, 11:33:22 am by Siwastaja »
 

Offline Vovk_Z

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #23 on: July 10, 2021, 03:11:14 pm »
Why aren't you telling them what part you want instead of asking what they have? Future has tons of 32.768kHz crystal offerings.
+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.
 

Online Siwastaja

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Re: Completely hopeless distributors these days
« Reply #24 on: July 10, 2021, 03:53:25 pm »
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?
 


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