I’d like to thank the corporate members of the Los Angeles/Orange County SMTA chapter, who invited me to speak at their breakfast meeting last week. My talk was on the supply chain and what I see are the inevitable collision of distributors and EMS companies of all sizes — and perhaps even the 3PLs (third party logisitics providers) — all of whom are vying for ownership over design and BoM procurement and management.

A special thanks to Michelle Ogihara of Sieka Machinery and Scott Penin of Paradigm Manufacturing Partners, who did all the leg work for setting up and publicizing my talk, and to Doug Dixon of Henkel, who bailed us all out by offering his PC and projection unit when ours failed to work properly. Public speaking isn’t my forte, but thanks to you my visit was truly enjoyable.