Rethinking Supply Chains With Cofactr
Full Transcript
Julie Toscano
Hello, everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us today for the Arena and Cofactr webcast on rethinking supply chains. We’re excited to have you here for a practical conversation on how manufacturers and designers are approaching supply chain resilience in a world where disruption is no longer the exception but the norm. Today’s discussion will focus less on theory and more on real-world lessons, what’s changed, what teams are doing differently, and where better decisions can be made earlier in the lifecycle. To set the stage for today’s discussion, here are the key questions guiding our conversation.
Supply chain resilience has fundamentally changed. What was once a transactional cost-driven function is now a strategic design constraint that touches engineering, sourcing, and operations from day one. Rather than treating disruption as something to react to, leading teams are building an optionality, visibility, and decision speed early in the product lifecycle. Today’s conversation will explore what that looks like in practice, what’s changed since COVID, how teams are approaching multisourcing and alternates, and how earlier cross-functional collaboration helps reduce risk when disruptions inevitably occur.
To bring these ideas to life, I’m excited to introduce our speakers who bring perspectives from both product lifecycle and operational supply chain realities. As your moderator today, I joined PTC Arena as a Customer Success Coach in June of 2025. Previously, I have worked in the consumer electronics industry for 15 years, telecom industry prior to that for companies including Sonos, Hayward Industries, and 3Com. My operations and supply chain background primarily comes from my experience at Sonos.
I have a background in electrical engineering. I graduated from WPI, and now I reside in North Carolina. But with me today on our panel, we have Lori Austin. She is the Director of Customer Success Coach here at PTC Arena.
She leads the team of coaches who are responsible for helping customers with PLM and QMS best practices. She has eight-plus years as an Arena coach and manager, and prior to Arena, she has 10-plus years in operations using Arena, including five years working within supply chain.
To round out our panel today, we also have Ed Dodd with us. Ed brings 20 years of experience in electronics assurance for critical applications and is currently working on improving parts management and industry supply chain processes. He currently serves as the Vice President, Government and Defense for Cofactr, a leading procurement automation company that is fusing supply chain assurance with procurement automation. Ed also serves as the Industry Vice Chair of the SAE Avionics Process Management Committee, working on standards like EIA 4899 and EIA 933.
Before we move into the discussion, I want to take a moment to ground us in how teams are actually approaching supply chain risk today. In Arena, supply chain intelligence isn’t just a concept. It’s a capability designed to help teams identify and mitigate risk earlier in the product lifecycle. And paired with platforms like Cofactr on the execution side, teams have more tools than ever to surface risk sooner and respond faster. So let’s first introduce some of the tools and services available to customers, including how Arena and Cofactr support risk mitigation across design and execution.
This will give us a shared reference point for the conversation. With that, I’ll turn it over to Ed Dodd to introduce Cofactr.
Ed Dodd
Wonderful. Thanks, Julie. So yes, so at Cofactr, we are a platform and service combined that helps companies understand their component intelligence, take that information and actually execute on procurement. We have warehouses so we can store their parts, we kit them up and make sure that they get where they’re going for manufacturing. So it’s a full end-to-end intelligence, component intelligence and procurement system, where we help companies select, buy, hit, and ship parts for their operations.
Next. And that service and platform is used to connect the range of teams involved in selecting and buying parts from engineering, who is often in the NPI stage, maybe less supported by the procurement as they’re building up their prototypes. And then as they go into production, the supply chain, they can hand over a well-scrubbed bill of materials that is already adapted to the supply chain realities so that procurement can take that into manufacturing and scale with confidence.
Finance likes it because everything is recorded and traceable. The procurement ledger ties everything back from the manufacturing all the way back to where the parts came from, allowing companies to get the unit cost squared away.
And of course, a tool like Cofactr works best when it’s fed with good data. And in that sense, we work with PLMs like Arena to take in the parts in their library and make sure that the parts that are being purchased are the ones that have been approved by the company.
Julie Toscano
Great. Thanks, Ed. And with that, let’s turn it over to Lori to present the Arena Supply Chain Intelligence feature.
Lori Austin
Yeah, thanks, Julie. Just a few notes on the Arena Supply Chain Intelligence feature, part of the Arena PLM and QMS. Arena Supply Chain Intelligence functionality, which we often refer to as SCI, allows our customers to understand part risk, availability, country of origin, cost in the marketplace, just to name a few. And this can be seen within the tool and basically help you understand how it affects your finished good. Is there to help our customers keep informed, make better decisions about the parts that make up their products.
And so using all this data to make those decisions really throughout the lifecycle during the design phases, new product introduction, and onto sustaining. And with these better decisions, it does help you reduce cycle time, which ultimately leads to reduced cost.
So during this discussion, we’ll be referring to SCI quite often as a tool. So just keep an eye out for all the references and the problems it helps solve. So over to you, Julie.
Julie Toscano
Thanks, Lori and Ed. Appreciate the context there. So let’s kick off our panel discussion. I look forward to speaking with you both. So let’s launch into our first question, kicking things off by zooming out for a moment.
What’s changed and why does supply chain resilience feel so different today than it did a few years ago?
Ed Dodd
I guess I could start. I think a year ago, I would have looked back at the big change that happened during the COVID pandemic. We went from having a huge global marketplace. Everything was moving relatively smoothly across borders. We had COVID happen. There were shipping challenges. There were factory challenges. People were having a hard time getting to work and making sure that they were safe in a factory environment. A lot of those factories shut down temporarily. Shipping, there were challenges. If you remember the ships that were parked off of the port of Los Angeles, there were huge bottlenecks. The entire industry just sort of seized up for a bit.
You also had changes in our behavior that happened at that time. We stopped driving for a little while. Everybody worked from home, which meant that people weren’t buying cars. The cars and the factories themselves weren’t being made. All of that not only pushed disruption up the supply chain with the goods trying to get to the point of assembly, but you also had demand signals that were interrupted flowing down the supply chain.
At the same time, our industry was going through a massive change where in the electronics world, there was a lot of focus on all of the technology we needed in order to work from home. We had a lot of the consumer electronics, the laptops and the desktops that we needed to use at home, plus all of the data center infrastructure that we were all using for things like video conferencing.
And so all of that together shifted the demand signal at the parts suppliers so that a lot of the parts shifted from the, I guess, mid-design, like the 40, 50 nanometer plus parts that were good for automotive and high reliability applications. And the focus then shifted to the more lucrative, more high-volume work that was required for the communications world for IT infrastructure and technology. Then the automotive industry tried to kick back on a couple of times, and you had these surges with the shortages and parts, which meant that companies were doing these sort of binge buys. And you had this very abrupt surge and sag in the component marketplace, which these became indicative for the year or twos after that, right?
Julie Toscano
A large pendulum swing there, Ed, with the turn on/turn off. Yeah.
Lori Austin
And I would say a lot of… So all that activity, I feel like people now were the awareness of so much disruption, just keeping their eyes out for anything that might change. So kind of a heightened awareness. And then of course you had AI stick its nose in there and come up and get quite active and allow us to look at lots of data faster and try to analyze it as fast as possible.
So I feel like people were overthinking as well with so much activity going on. And the “what ifs” were people just continuously wondering, what if this happened? Even though that isn’t happening at the moment, but because we saw so many different things going on, I feel like companies were just always…
Heightened awareness is probably the key. Maybe even overanalyzing a little bit, buying too much, buying not enough, and then just trying to figure out how they’re going to make product or manufacture their products with the decisions that they did make.
Ed Dodd
Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges that we face as an industry is that the models that we’ve relied upon for the last 10 or 15 years in terms of what the component lifecycle should look like when a new technology’s introduced and how that production is supposed to ramp gradually and demand gradually rises up as it gets qualified into newer and newer applications, and then over time peak and be sustained until it’s replaced by new technology and then bid it out.
That lifecycle worked really well when, I guess, when it was sort of natural forces, when the pace of technology innovation was relatively steady, the forces that led to discontinuation were just functional obsolescence as it faded out and new technology took over. Now we’ve got so much probabilistic change in the marketplace that it’s no longer that sort of nice, easy bell curve. There are events that are completely interrupting those curves.
And so companies that are being burned or have been burned by single events, I think to your point, Lori, is that they’re becoming more and more sensitized to any sort of shift, and then you get these sort of large lifetime buys that might be a little premature, which further stressed the market. So it’s almost like this harmonic feedback loop where you’re getting this demand overload along with supply disruption.
Julie Toscano
Right. Definitely. Great. Thanks, guys. How are teams defining good decisions today compared to pre-COVID, especially when cost is no longer the only driver? Back when I was a younger engineer, you could say, I guess, we would always second source mainly from a cost perspective to give our sourcing managers volume pricing alternates, but today it sounds like they’re, based on what you guys were saying, taking into account a lot of other data perspectives.
So what are good decisions that they’re making today that maybe they weren’t taking into account before as far as using that data?
Lori Austin
I think just there’s so much data out there and so many… And with all that data, good tools that collect it all up and show it in a one-page format so you can… The reason why I say, why does this feel like a good decision, is because now you’re not hunting for more data. You’ve actually got quite, almost all the data you need in front of you, and now it’s a matter of analyzing it and analyzing it all at one time.
So I think those tools, like we mentioned earlier on the SCI side, are helping quite a bit, making faster decisions and just raising your confidence up quite a bit.
Ed Dodd
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think the tools are definitely driving a lot of the improvement in the decision-making process, and a lot of that has to do with visibility, having not just all of the data, because you could drown in a data lake quite easily, but having the right data surface at the right time, visualizations and dashboards, and really understanding in Cofactr, when you load your bill of materials in, you get a dashboard with the health score of that bill of materials within seconds, and it’s like spell check.
We’re no longer having to send it off, send everything we write off to an editor when we’re writing in Word. The spell check is happening in real time and inline. As we move to more operational tools like Cofactr, we’re seeing those decisions being made as part of the purchasing process, as part of the design process. As you load your prototype bill of materials into Cofactr, you see very clearly the risks that you’re taking before you even start to price and source those parts. It’s just these are the parts that only have one supplier.
These are the parts that are near end of life. These are the parts that you don’t have alts for. And just that visibility, it’s not decision-making magic, but being able to see the little red squiggle under the word you misspelled saves you a ton of time having to go back and proofread.
Julie Toscano
Right. I love that analogy, Ed, with the spell check. I think that’s a great idea. I think having it all in front of you at your fingertips sometimes can feel overwhelming, but if you can figure out the magic balance that your business models need of data to have in front of you to make those decisions, I think that’s key to also really honing in what risks are in front of you.
And I think it also varies from company to company too, based on their business processes, right?
Ed Dodd
Yeah. Yeah. And you’re 100% right. And I think defining good decisions from an outcomes perspective is no longer getting that assembly built at the cheapest price point. It’s being able to get that assembly built by the time you need it because lead times right now are fluctuating, availability is fluctuating. And if you’re making the kinds of decisions that get parts to your manufacturer, by the time you need to assemble, you’ve made the good decisions. I think that’s what’s defining good decisions to that. Right?
Julie Toscano
Correct. So supply chain resilience today requires an approach to multisource components, which of course is easy to say, but hard to do. So what does doing it well actually look like?
Ed Dodd
Well, I think I can start here with kind of a functional safety analogy. When we’re designing cars and airplanes and things that we put our lives into, where if something goes wrong, somebody gets hurt. We look at redundancy as a way that we feel good that if something goes wrong, there is another something that takes over and makes sure everybody is safe. So redundancy is a major part of that framework.
And in the same way, functional safety is a risk-based decision-making system, and so is supply chain risk management, supply chain resilience planning. And so applying the same sorts of concepts to supply chain leads us to two different concepts.
Number one is multisourcing. If I have a part and I’m designing that into my design, can I get it from more than one place? Is there more than one distributor that I can go to and get that part if one distributor runs out or has a bad relationship with the component manufacturer, whatever, am I okay?
Now, that is good. It’s all great unless there’s a problem with the part itself. If there’s a problem with the part itself, that problem is going to travel through every path to you.
It doesn’t matter what distributor you get it from, the problem’s with the part. So you also need alts. So if you have more than one part, more than one manufactured part type, part number, and even better more than one manufacturer, and then for each of those parts, make sure you can get it from multiple sources. I think that gives you the highest level of resilience you can really hope for in a reasonable scenario. Obviously, if you’re only making two of something and it’s going to the moon, if you’re working on the Artemis mission, you’re working under constraints that are atypical.
They’re not usual and you’re doing things that most people normally wouldn’t. But on the whole, I think multisource with alts and making sure that that system is healthy is sort of what resilience looks like.
Lori Austin
And for that, what’s key is that that process that you just went through is actually written down, that the team knows that single source is not optimal. Obviously, there are certain parts that have to be single source because they’re processor chips or what have you, but making sure that the whole team knows the process that the organization wants to follow when it comes to part selection, which parts are okay not to be multisource, which ones must be, et cetera.
But everyone thinking in the same way. And that way, you’re not in the 11th hour trying to figure out how to get another source in there because you just found out that there’s a shortage that you hadn’t anticipated. So I think process pulls that all together.
Julie Toscano
I completely agree, Lori. I think that being able to quantify the complexity of the part, the component, will help understand the risk if the part is single sourced or if it’s multisourced, even if both sources are unavailable, what rigor needs to be put in behind it to get a third one qualified?
And in a case where they both get shut down, like I was saying, there are so many different ways that the supply chain can shut down these days. Just because you’re multisource doesn’t mean you’re safe, unfortunately. So thinking about Arena, obviously that’s our background, Lori, but we know that Arena can support BOM substitutes versus potential and approved alternate sources.
For folks that are debating if a component should be an alternate source or a BOM substitute, do you have any guidance for them about how to structure that for some resilience built in?
On alternates, obviously form, fit, and function is key, making sure that it is form, fit, and function equivalent. Substitutes are usually “break one of those three.” I often, and this is with cables, sometimes I often talk to customers about if your substitute, if you’re talking to cable and you always want, it doesn’t matter what color it is, and you were able to procure a black cable and now you need same pin out or whatever, but now you need yellow.
Yellow is all you could find. So that’s different and a different part number, but you would add that as a substitute. And then Ed, you might have some other thoughts on that as well.
Ed Dodd
No, I think you said that, right? The concept of substitutes; you’ve always got to keep in mind that what you need to do in order to adapt the substitute to the design, because if you didn’t need to do anything, it would be an alternative.
So I mean, in the case of the color, somebody might need to wrap it with some electrical tape that indicates that it’s a different… its function in the assembly. But things like interposers, things like making sure that you’re designing in the right kind of space that would accept an interposer in the case where you need one, there’s a range of different design methods that make the design itself a little more resilient to adaptation in the future.
Julie Toscano
Are you alluding to double footprints or dual footprints?
Ed Dodd
Dual footprints is definitely one of those things where you can take the same function and map it to two different footprints in case if you’ve got a leaded part, you might put a QFN footprint underneath it that is routed similarly so that even if there is no exact form, fit, and function part, you could still get away with a part that is function only if the form and fit has been accounted for in the design. So you’re basically designing the alternate into the board, the board layout.
Julie Toscano
Have either of you seen in your travels, as a designer, you’re browsing for parts on a distributor website, you find one as we just mentioned, they can come in QFN versus TSSOP. Is there any guidance out there over which footprint may be more available today, tomorrow, two years from now, and any of the data that you’ve seen out there to help engineers at least pick the primary one?
Ed Dodd
I mean, 10 years ago, we could have looked at the typical lifecycles of the technologies and the footprints. We were seeing a relatively stable progression from high profile components.
And by that, I mean the height of the components themselves to thinner and thinner components as we started playing with phones and trying to get six different PCPs inside the brick we’re carrying in our pocket. And so everything got thinner and thinner and everything got more high speed, so signal integrity is a big part of that. But these days, the forces that are pushing and pulling on packaging and the technology itself, like I said, is becoming a far less deterministic. And those lifecycles, I don’t know how much we can trust anymore.
So really, I would be looking at component lifecycle, I would be looking at historical availability, which in a tool like Cofactr, you can look at that part and understand what the availability has been over the last six months. And you can see surges, you can see sags, you can see that maybe it’s only available once every six months in large quantities, and then it disappears within three weeks of that availability, maybe indicating that those parts have been made for a specific customer.
Julie Toscano
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Ed Dodd
So that big production run was in anticipation of their regular customer going and doing a bulk buy. So what might look like something that is available in the marketplace really isn’t because they’re kind of observed, right?
Julie Toscano
Yeah.
Ed Dodd
Really, it’s on a component-by-component basis. And these days, the biggest challenges are at the technology notes.
Julie Toscano
Interesting. Thank you. So we’ve talked a lot about multisourcing and finding alternate components and how to incorporate them into design. So for teams who are new to this, where can they prioritize where to start?
Lori Austin
So I do believe starting, let’s just go basic. Just make sure your data’s all documented in your PLM system, like Arena. Just ensure that it’s documented in something that you can get to it easily. And then on top of that, having the tools to analyze the data in real time, that allows you to have… The entire organization can look at the data. It’s not just a small set of team members that have access to the data, but it allows your entire organizations, your ops, et cetera.
So document, having the teams all look at the same data. We talked about process earlier, having the definition, and then I think you’re all set to analyze and look for your areas where you want to have your alternates, multiple sources, et cetera.
Ed Dodd
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think when we, when we talk about where to start and prioritization, multisourcing is low-hanging fruit, especially if you’ve got a tool like Cofactr where you can quickly see which parts don’t have multiple sources, maybe shift over to a part that does.
Looking at the difference between, you mentioned component complexity. Obviously, there are relatively standard parts. We’ve 0402 resistors and capacitors, for example, relatively common, relatively universal in so-called standard values.
But then when you start prioritizing and now that you’ve got that information, are you done? Definitely not. Tying back to that first question, we’ve moved from a world of just-in-time sourcing, making sure those parts get to your manufacturer right the day that they’re manufactured and then nobody has to pay for storage, or nobody has to keep those parts. And we took advantage of that open global marketplace and easy transportation and shipping and logistics to really design out all of the costs associated with any kind of staging.
That’s shifted. And it’s been a number of years since a lot of the practitioners remember how to do it. But now we’ve got to look at our bill of materials. We’ve got to look at the state of the supply chain and figure out which parts, because you don’t need to do this everywhere, but which parts make sense for me to maybe keep some on hand?
Where should I give myself some margin? And how do I start thinking about that? How long am I going to manufacture this? If there is a supply shortage, how long is it going to take me to redesign this or shift to a different part? And that’s when you can start answering the kinds of questions of, well, how many should I keep? Which parts are at risk? Which parts are hard to replace? If you can switch and just buy a different part and replace it in, then your switching time is zero, and that kind of answers your question about how many you should keep on hand.
But if it’s going to take you six months, you should have six months of parts on hand. And that’s kind of where Cofactr helps in that for OEMs and manufacturers and design teams that don’t really have their own storage facilities, like I said, we’ve nurtured an entire generation of companies that have grown up on just in time, so they don’t have those processes and those facilities. So something like Cofactr allows them to ship those parts to our warehouse where we’ll keep them ready for their manufacturer.
Julie Toscano
I do want to get back to the process note, Lori, but before we do that, I want to circle back on something Ed had just said about, again, getting back to the complexity and the runway to be prepared if something becomes unavailable.
So I think Ed, what you were getting at was that, for example, if you have a component that becomes unavailable and it’s so core to the platform that you need to make a software change now in order to get an alternate design out there, versus maybe qualifying something on the lab bench, versus just reading the data sheet to review side by side the parts.
I think that having that data point also helps make that assessment and plan accordingly. And I think, Lori, that leads us into the process that we were talking about before and how can teams get this process together to get started? Who typically participates in this process formulation?
Lori Austin
It’s really, I mean, the organization, most of the organization, operations, engineering, quality are all going to need to participate. It’s not just engineering leading it or ops leading it. It’s really all three of them. And then I do think every once in a while, finance does play a part in this. And so just having everyone agree which direction you’re going to go and when things do follow a more complex path, especially I’d say if you, on those processor chips where it affects software, firmware, et cetera, where you perhaps need to now engage another team, another engineering team that may already think that they’re done in this product, they’ve moved on, but you might need to think through that.
And then we looked at weighing what’s the lifespan here to see if you do need to go down the software route with another processor, is that used in another product or might be used in another product, so that you can get some longevity out of it?
Julie Toscano
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think it brings us to our next question about being proactive and data driven. Both of these can be done during the early design phases to help mitigate supply chain interruptions.
So are there other ways engineering teams can continue to work cross-functionally with the supply chain teams early in the design process? Like you said, perhaps having two alternate plans for the design or for platform.
I mean, it’s hard enough you’re trying to get one platform to work when you’re prototyping, right? To have them do two or to keep one in their back pocket seems like a lot to ask for.
Lori Austin
I think it is a lot to ask for, but I feel like what we talked about earlier on being hypersensitive, sometimes the what ifs are spinning in your head and you just are trying to be extra careful.
But one thing, actually, to emphasize is we talked about relationships in the last question—maintaining those relationships, keeping in contact with those teams is super important. I think making sure that you’re continuing to be in alignment with each other on how some of the decision-making on when to call in those other plans.
I think bringing back to your earlier point of having your data in the PLM to share out, engineers are perfectionists, and we like to wait before revealing our hand. However, I think in most cases now these days that they’re actually being required to share their data perhaps before it’s fully scrubbed.
So operations teams can get a jump on procurement on some visibility to what’s coming up because I think that’s the best way to avoid the surprises; when the design’s thrown over the wall to operations say, “I can’t get this part.”
What were you thinking? And then it’s back to the drawing board, right?
Ed Dodd
Right, right. And that’s where something like Cofactr, it’s a platform that both the engineers and supply chain and procurement are sharing. So as engineering is prototyping and putting in their bill of materials, not only are they doing a solid first-pass edit, and going back to that spell check thing, but before it goes over to what would be the professional editing team, it’s already got that first-pass polish, which then lets the supply chain teams and the purchasing teams dig in and work on the stuff that is meaningful, understanding which parts are critical, which parts might need to be stockpiled, how much of it they need to be stockpiled, working with the engineering team at that point.
So not only does the engineering team have to do the work to provide that visibility up, and again, working on the same platform definitely helps, but supply chain also needs to make use of that visibility and have that conversation with engineering to understand which parts in the design are absolutely critical.
Sometimes you really can’t help that. When you’re going into your PDR, you’ve established your design architecture around specific components, and those are the seeds of your design. Having an alternate for that might or might not be practical, like you said.
And so engineering and supply chain can work together at that stage and really understand what they’re anchoring themselves to and either position, work with the engineering team and get the engineering team the funding they need to make that second prototype for an alternate, or create a supply chain strategy that either mitigates potential disruption with some inventory or sets up some relationships to ensure that those parts will be available when they need them.
Julie Toscano
I think that Via talked about that in the past, what levers do folks have once that platform is, like you said, taken root? Can teams think about buffers versus flexibility or reshoring?
What levers do folks have as options that can help get them out of a reactive situation?
Ed Dodd
Well, I mean, it’s all about planning. I think getting themselves out of a situation is a lot harder than avoiding getting into the situation. There’s a little more upfront work and it might be harder to justify to management if we’re still elevating cost to our highest metric.
But if we can plan, if we can plan appropriately, we can avoid a lot of the disruption. There’s still going to be some disruption. And in those cases, really working with your supply chain team, working with companies like Cofactr who can help identify alternate sources, who can help expedite the availability of whatever is in the marketplace, that’s going to be critical. Otherwise, you are in a redesign phase, and you’re sort of stuck until you’re at the mercy of the supply chain.
Julie Toscano
Lori, going back to our process, you and I are both big fans of process, and I know a lot of engineers roll their eyes at process, but it has saved me a number of different times. But even after you completed your design release, I think having a process plan in place for, “Hey, we didn’t get to do alternate sourcing or qualify alternate sources for these 10 components before we release to production.”
Having a process to then qualify them in a sustaining cycle perhaps might be the answer for that.
Lori Austin
Right. Yeah, definitely it’s never too late to do an evaluation.
Julie Toscano
Right. Working that in and having that process defined upfront, I think, and having those expectations set too. I mean, of course, these alternate designs, you have to make sure you have those components in stock to be able to …
Lori Austin
Oh yeah. No, you’ve got the same principles to apply, but hopefully with that heightened awareness, you’re thinking about all the angles at that point.
Julie Toscano
Trying to stay one step ahead, right?
Lori Austin
Right.
Julie Toscano
So lastly, with all sorts of supply chain disruptions going on, are there any that you think folks are still underestimating out there?
Lori Austin
I don’t know purposely if they’re underestimating, but things are changing quickly with, the tariffs are probably top of mind. Those change weekly, monthly, they change often. So I think definitely companies have thought about changing manufacturing sites, et cetera. And with that comes all the disruptions of where you send material, et cetera. So yeah.
Julie Toscano
I know. And you and I had had a conversation too, Lori, about contract manufacturers ultimately holding sourcing information for their customers and not putting that in the PLM. And I think folks can underestimate the amount of work that does require if you do need to switch that and own it. Yeah.
Lori Austin
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s part of why I did bring that up earlier is having your data documented in a PLM system as the single source of truth is the most important thing you can do. It’s your intellectual property; having it documented there with an approval process so that the whole team is behind what is written down there. And then that makes it easier to make decisions about the changes you want to make. There’s never any second guessing.
Ed Dodd
Yeah. I think you’re spot on with the point that there’s a lot of chaos right now. And the biggest weapon we’ve got against chaos is communication, especially in an organization. We’ve talked about it a couple of times today where you’ve got engineering and operations and supply chain and manufacturing all needing to work together and be on the same page in a really dynamic environment.
I can’t stress enough how often we hear that it’s the visibility and ability to communicate over a platform like Cofactr that allows them to maneuver and be as nimble as the problems require. And I guess for supply chain disruptions that we might still be underestimating, I think the DDR4 problem is going to continue to grow. I think that’s only going to be exacerbated by the shift in production to data center and IT infrastructure.
I think there isn’t a new line coming on. So every time a company shifts and increases their production of DDR5, they’re actually poaching from DDR4 capacity because I think that the next set of production capacity, I think that’s going to be coming online isn’t until 27, 2028. So every shift we make is going to reduce the DDR4, and that’s kind of a smaller piece of high reliability electronics. So mature node semiconductors that we put in our airplanes and our cars.
And I think the mature node semiconductor space is also contracting, so you’re going to see some demand challenges there as well, I think. Other than that, we’ve got all the disruption from the events in the Middle East to include things like helium, which is sort of low visibility, but incredibly important for semiconductor manufacturing.
So just things like that. There are hidden resources, hidden natural resources that we need as ingredients to this global economic engine that we’ve built that oftentimes get lost in the noise. And keeping our eyes open on that is going to be important going forward.
Julie Toscano
I think that goes back, Ed, to where we started with this conversation, where it was the pendulum swings were driven by what was going on in the market and a broader scope of vision there to say, what’s actually driving these changes? And I think your call-out, especially with the DDR4 and AI and data centers being behind that now, I mean, you said earlier it was with COVID, it was the automobile industry and the pendulum swings there.
Now it’s, I don’t know who would’ve predicted. AI would be the next one and wonder what the next one is in another five years, there’ll be another one I’m sure that’s on the horizon driving up another pendulum swing somewhere else beyond DDR four and five.
So as we wrap up, one theme really stands out here as supply chain resilience is no longer about predicting disruption, it’s about designing for it. The teams that navigate volatility best are building in options through multisourcing and alternates, creating early visibility across engineering and supply chain and reducing the time it takes to make informed decisions when conditions change. What we’ve heard today reinforces that resilience is shaped early by engineering choices, data completeness, cross-functional collaboration, process, not just by downstream tactics like buffers or reshoring.
Those are just almost like band-aids or last-minute solutions, but disruption may be inevitable. But how prepared you are for it, though, is very much a design decision. And I want to thank our speakers for sharing these real-world lessons.
And if you’d like to learn more about the solutions from Arena or Cofactr, please reach out to our team here on the slide. The contact information is provided. Thank you to everyone who joined us today.
Lori Austin
Thanks, Julie. Thanks, Ed.
Ed Dodd
Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Julie.
Julie Toscano
Thank you.
Ed Dodd
Thank you, Lori.