How are you dealing with the current supply chain constraints?

[Jantzen]

With the pandemic wrecking havoc on supply chains across the world and a global semiconductor shortage, how is your company dealing with issues in supply chain? 

I pulled a few quotes from the articles below that highlighted how bad the problem is hitting our industry:

"The top five challenges IT departments face in fulfilling their IT hardware demands are insufficient request information (37%), single vendor reliance (32%), vendor-enforced order limits (32%), opaque delivery timeframes (30%), and employees not returning their systems (30%)."

"GetApp discovered that 78% of the respondents faced an IT hardware supply chain delay in the past 12 months, including from Dell (50%), Microsoft (47%), and Apple (43%). 71% of respondents are experiencing shipping delays of up to six months, and 52% have waited between four to 13 months."

Here are a few articles addressing the supply chain issues:

• https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/hardware/news/it-hardware-supply-chain-disruption/
• https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-big-shortage-lessons-from-2021-on-how-to-navigate-supply-con...

[Darren]

Our biggest issue this year has been network switches - we ended up having to look for suitable devices across multiple vendors, as opposed to just sticking to our preferred choice - some couldn't provide even a rough ETA on components, let alone shipping dates.  Planning was made more difficult by auto-generated ETAs being e-mailed out and then obviously being missed.

We've taken the position that unless stock is showing as available, then expect to be waiting a long time - anything being sent for order is likely to be months, or even over a year in some cases.  We've basically stopped looking at ETAs at this point.

We're actually in the process of writing a blog post for our web site about this and our experiences as it's had a significant impact on some of our current projects.

[Darren]

Here's the blog post we've written based on our experiences - with references to some interesting articles!

https://www.deeserve.co.uk/blog/2022-it-supply-chain-issues/

[Shannon]

Thanks for sharing your blog Darren! Appreciate the solution solving ideas like get innovative with older tech in order to sustain until supply chain improvements happen.