Q1: With the electronics industry constantly expanding, where do you see the most growth in relation to the products you currently offer?
Trends like electric mobility, autonomous driving, and industry 4.0, to name only some, have started to increase the demand for electronic products and innovations over the past years and will continue to increase it further. Although this is generally great news for the whole electronics value chain, especially EMS providers are currently struggling with the consequences of faster innovation, while specialist and part shortage, as well as manual processes, are slowing down their work.
We see the specific bottleneck in the request for quotation (RfQ) processes between EMS providers and their clients. Clients are progressively designing products and as a result demanding faster quotes from EMS providers who, for this process, are often still relying on legacy tools (such as MS Office), phone calls, and lengthy email correspondence.
With the software we currently offer, we support EMS companies to move their RfQ process entirely into a digital work environment, enabling real-time collaboration and intelligent algorithms to clean the most cluttered bills of material (BOMs). LumiQuote, said EMS RfQ software, automates the sourcing process, streamlines the comparison and selection of parts, and allows for constant updates on availability, lead time, and status. This enables EMS providers to be much more efficient with their quotes and win more clients, as well as handle agreements during running projects and retroactive multiple sourcing strategies more seamlessly.
Q2: In reference to the environment and the world becoming a greener society, has this affected the way your company operates?
Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role in society in general, but also in many areas of value creation in the electronics industry. Compliance with environmental and social guidelines (such as RoHS, REACH, Conflict Minerals) is becoming more and more central to the development of electronic products and the selection of suitable components and suppliers. We have noticed ourselves that many companies are starting to proactively deal with supply chain sustainability and not just reactively address new guidelines.
We support this positive development by directly displaying information about the compliance status of individual components to our EMS customers in our tool. Thus, the EMS can consider sustainability criteria immediately in the selection process and effortlessly contribute to the production of more sustainable electronic products.
Q3: In the next five years, in what ways can you see your company transitioning to keep up with the ever-changing industry?
It is our goal to expand our EMS RfQ software into the “Electronics Operating System”, a new fundamental data and software layer that rethinks processes not only for EMS providers, but also for OEMs, distributors, and suppliers in order to accelerate technological progress. We think this global ever-changing industry will require more frequent, seamless, and efficient communication and collaboration within and between the many companies along the value chain and we want to provide a base for this. While the demand for faster, better, more complex electronic products will keep increasing over the next few years, we want to grow from optimizing the RfQ process to improving the full process of product development from design to manufacturing. Using one tool among various companies and in the different stages of product development will be extremely powerful for analyzing performance, learning from the data, and improving exactly where improvement is needed.
Q4: Due to the pandemic, has there been a certain product whose sales volume has unpredictably increased a great deal?
As for effects caused by the pandemic, we have noticed the impact it had on our customers. New and existing challenges like the current part and supply shortage and remote work have reinforced the need for data-driven, flexible, and seamless processes to stay competitive in the near future.
LumiQuote is valued by our customers especially during these uncertain times because it supports them with identifying and resolving potential difficulties within the supply chain faster and because alternative sourcing strategies can be implemented easier during quoting or a running order.
We realize this in our software essentially by implementing a central storage of data, information, and progress, through numerous connections to suppliers, and by keeping BOMs digitally connected even after components have been selected. As a result, collaborators can see the latest status of a document from any location and independent of receiving email updates from others. Also, the constantly changing delivery parameters update automatically and don’t have to be checked manually anymore.
We’re convinced that these advantages highlighted by the current situation will continue to show once a kind of normality settles back in. More and more innovative EMS have already decided to seize the opportunity of a transitioning industry and modernize their processes with us. We would like to invite everyone interested in experiencing LumiQuote to connect with us by booking a live demo via our website: https://links.luminovo.ai/demo-ebom.
Company: Luminovo
