DISTRIBUTION


Consultant or supply chain partner?


Steve Carr looks at the growing role of distribution in power systems design


The role that the distributor plays in its customers’ power systems designs is changing fast, and this is because of a number of factors external to distribution, and one important internal factor. The external factors are all either the cause of massive pressure on OEMs’ design teams, or have arisen in response to it. Perhaps the most familiar is time to market. OEMs in almost every market sector are striving to achieve a faster rate of product development and market release. This forces design teams to concentrate their engineering fire on the most critical elements of a design, in which the OEM can add most value and differentiation. The power supply is necessary and important, but rarely is it a source of competitive advantage for an end product manufacturer.


Alongside this market pressure sits regulatory


pressure. A strand in many governments’ strategy for containing climate change is to force manufacturers of energy-consuming products to make them more efficient. This alone imposes a burden on OEMs, since design effort must be expended to replace old, inefficient power designs with new, more efficient ones. But there is also the compliance burden – the


requirement to keep up to date with the changes in regulations. For exporters this is all the more onerous, since each large market tends to have its own flavour of regulation or voluntary code that is slightly different from the rest. At the same time, most OEMs employ far fewer specialist analogue design engineers than in the past. The age profile of analogue engineers is typically older, since most new graduates concentrate on digital and software engineering. As analogue engineers retire, they are typically replaced by digital engineers and computer scientists, and as a result OEMs have little in- house analogue expertise to call on. Partly in response to this trend, there is now a dizzying choice of power modules and bricks, as well as power ICs and reference designs, to help provide off-the-shelf building blocks for power system designs. These factors are external to distribution – they


are facts of our customers’ lives. But like any customer problem, they are also an opportunity. And the one big internal change in the distribution market is a new concentration on vertical or horizontal market solutions. Future Electronics has a reasonable claim to have started the trend: its Future Lighting Solutions division, founded in 2000, was the first specialist unit in


the electronics industry devoted to the service of the new solid-state (LED) lighting industry. The purpose of Future Lighting Solutions was to be more than a supply-chain partner. Its aim was to provide unexpected extra value, in the form of consultancy that helped the customer earn more revenue – an unprecedented proposition from a distributor. In the vision for Future Lighting Solutions, this value would be provided through having an intimate involvement in the customer’s development process. Not just supplying a component or components. Not just supplying sub-systems, such as the light engine or driver, in which components fit. And not just helping the OEM to design its end product. In fact, Future Lighting Solutions has in many cases helped its customers to work out what kind of end product they can build, and to define its architecture.


In solid-state lighting, this service was required because a fundamental technical change (the introduction of high-brightness LEDs) was turning the industry upside down, and OEMs lacked the engineering resources to respond to the change (lighting manufacturers tended to employ mechanical and electrical engineers, but not electronics engineers). Future Lighting Solutions bridged the technical gap.


Now something similar is happening in the field of power systems design. A number of important technical changes are taking place, such as the transition from linear to switching power supplies, and the implementation of power factor correction; these changes are by and large driven by the need to improve power efficiency. At the same time, OEMs lack analogue engineers with specific power supply design expertise.


In the view of Future Electronics, this problem can be solved in a similar way to the problem the lighting industry had: with a dedicated distribution unit providing a similar level of consultancy. For Future Electronics, the model of Future Lighting Solutions is very helpful in this regard: it has helped us to shape a new, global Future Power Solutions division.


Like its sister lighting division, it is its own operating unit with its own set of franchised suppliers, as well as suppliers shared with its Future Electronics parent. It also has its own staff who are trained and directed to offer consultancy and design support for power system designs. In any given customer, they might or they might not be working alongside colleagues from Future


4 CIE Power Supplement May 2013 Steve Carr


Electronics, but if they are, the Future Electronics people will be selling a broadline portfolio, while the Future Power Solutions engineer will only be working with the customer on their power supply.


And yes, a distributor really can act more as a consultant than as a salesman. After all, when a distributor’s customer is successful, it’s good for the distributor’s bottom line too. And a distributor can help OEMs with, for instance: • Implementing a successful transition from a linear power supply design to a switching power supply design to gain huge efficiency benefits while mitigating the risks of noise and EMI • Achieving compliance with the plethora of


efficiency and power-factor regulations in place around the world • Making appropriate ‘make or buy’ decisions when faced with today’s vast choice of commercial off-the-shelf modules and brick power supplies • Taking advantage of the latest high-


efficiency switch-mode power supply topologies, such as quasi-resonant conversion and synchronous rectification, and of ICs made from exotic materials such as silicon carbide (SiC) • Implementing or modifying proven reference designs, such as Future Power Solutions’ own PowerStar reference board, and designs provided by franchised suppliers A distributor can even provide turnkey design services for OEMs, to implement new or modified designs, such as replacing obsolescent parts, or to achieve a design specification such as ‘94% efficiency with PFC’.


And it can do this because, while our customers have been shedding analogue and power engineers, distributors such as Future Electronics have been recruiting them. Aggregated across multiple customers, there is plenty of demand for their skills.


So while on the traditional model designers designed and distributors sold, the world is now changing. OEMs are voting with their feet and choosing to use distributors that can help them not only improve their supply chain but also to improve their end product. And this is the service that Future Electronics, with its Future Power Solutions division, sets out to provide.


Future Electronics | www.futureelectronics.com


Steve Carr is Director of Vertical Markets, Future Electronics (EMEA)


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