Pallab’s Place

Jabil Circuit has been in the electronics manufacturing and supply chain business since 1966. Historically, they were best known for their subcontract manufacturing of PC Boards and enclosures. In the late 90’s - early 2000’s they added in the full supply chain support for the electronic product development market.

In recent discussions with Jabil, they have refined their model and are expanding in two areas - localized supply chain implementation and semiconductor supply chain. The driving forces for this refinement is minimizing the cost and time associated with the logistics of material movement from component production to test to system assembly. In the medial and instrumentation space, the localized supply chain has focused on supporting and supplying ROHS compliant services and facilities as a migration path for their customers. This approach is being targeted at a global expansion model after strong success in North America, solid migration into the European community and early phase in Asia and the Pacific Rim.

The need for this model is to support the increasing diversity of low & mid volume high product mix applications. These applications need a supply chain that not only includes standard subcontract manufacturing of the boards, component assembly and insertion into enclosure but also includes incomming component screening, in-production test, post-programing test, final test and packaging insertion. At this time they are operating/supporting 14 factories worldwide. On the medical side products include: digital imaging, patient monitoring, record keeping and patient bedside PCs and connected display environments, and in-hospital flatscreen/portable products.

The transition to the semiconductor supply chain was actually a customer driven direction due to the progression of System On a Chip (SOC) design. This shift resulted in a reducction of the manufacturing supply chain for a lot of systems to just a component level product, enclosures, memory and displays. In the semiconductor supply chain, they are providing customized build solutions for equipment manufacturers to be able to replica manufacture their equipment, as designed in R&D, near the point of sale, application and support of the semiconductor wafer fab. The supply chain includes both the wafer fab portion of the process as well as the electrical test, packaging and final test portions. The emergence of the semiconductor target model has given rise it a market split of 50% in North America and 50% in Asia primarily in Penang and Shanghi.

This supply chain model, that has been implemented by Jabil, for expansion of the subcontract manufacturing community is the new model that companies are shifting to in order to address the reduced component count of mobile electronic systems and offset the high cost of transportation for people and materials.

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