To be honest, in our experience as a manufacturer RS/Farnell/whoever are already far too heavily geared towards serving "Ted in his shed" who orders tiny quantities of things and cares nothing for production compatibility. This has an adverse affect on everyone else, so I might want for example 200 SO8 parts, which is rather less than the 2500 on a std reel, a cut tape would be perfectly acceptable, but no, because of "Ted in his sodding shed", RS has chopped that entire 2500 reel, that represents their entire stock, into strips of 1 and put them in stupid little bags. Frankly they all need to move that kind of service to another tier, make it the exception not the rule its drives me up the wall. You can theoretically bypass the issue some of the time by liaising with a specific desk/service area for some of these suppliers, but that stops you ordering online and adds the delay of a human processing your order.