Spotlight On


to providing the best possible service to our customers.


What are Digi-Key's long-term goals for the European market?


We’re working to extend our reach and service to our customers as much as possible. We’re also expanding the localisation of content for each market. Digi-Key is continuing to ask our customers for feedback and what we could do better. With the different cultures, languages and ways of doing business in Europe, asking these questions and working to localise our business is especially important.


Beyond the basics of distribution and delivering products to customers, what is your strategy to support engineers and especially the new emerging community of ‘makers’?


Our offering is very much focused on online support. Digi-Key doesn’t have the traditional Field Application Engineers (FAEs) that visit customers. We have extensive online support, product training models, reference designs, and blogs like TheCircuit.


Digi-Key engineers also maintain the eewiki forum where they share their knowledge. Offering EDA tools and webchat is also key to support engineers during their design cycle. The main feature for makers is Maker.io and that’s a part of the website that really helps people take their ideas from their head to concept to finished product.


How is Digi-Key investing in new infrastructure right now despite the economic downturn?


We’ve seen some challenges in the electronics market, but Digi-Key is pretty clear on what we want to do. We want to broaden our inventory and our number of suppliers. The biggest way we’re doing that is investing in a significant expansion of our current product distribution center (PDC).


We’re well along in adding 204 thousand square meters to the current PDC and by 2021, we’ll have increased capacity to support our growing global customer base, as well as be able to add more franchises and products.


What types of digital solutions does Digi-Key offer to its customers?


For engineers, we have design automation tools like Scheme-it , KiCad and also our DK IoT Studio. For buyers, we have great online pricing tools, like PANDA for very simple pricing and availability. For larger bill of materials enquiries for engineers or buyers, we have the BOM manager, where you can upload BOM’s and get pricing, availability, RoHS, REACH, lifecycle data etc.


The key tool to building a solid digital strategy is going to be our API solutions. The demand for this form of automation is becoming stronger and stronger. Purchasing departments want APIs to look at price, availability and ordering primarily at the moment. The machine- to-machine connection makes everything as efficient as possible.


In addition to API solutions, we’re also investing in new technology for customers like Visual Search, 360-degree images and voice assistant tools. It’s very exciting to see Digi-Key and the entire electronics industry change and continue to embrace automation and innovation.


What are the main challenges in the industry right now?


The immediate challenge right now is the economic slowdown for suppliers and distributors. Digi-Key is remaining very positive – this is part of the cycle and we’ve seen it before. We’re maintaining our inventory breadth and excellent customer service. From manufacturing to shipping, we’re also aware of the responsibility we have to the environment. People are already making changes and moving quickly on this across all industries to continue


supporting sustainability - we just need to make sure we’re doing all we can in the electronics industry.


Beyond our suppliers and employees, our customers continue to remain the central focus of all we do at Digi-Key.


Our business model continues to revolve around engineers and buyers’ needs and we strive to be a valuable partner to them through the entire design process.


digikey.co.uk


www.cieonline.co.uk


Components in Electronics


September 2019 31


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