Parts again

Status
Not open for further replies.
petersonra

petersonra

Senior Member
Location
Northern illinois
Occupation
Semi-retired engineer
So one of our engineers ordered some Allen Bradley parts the other day. Don't recall offhand what they were but Allen Bradley is predicting delivery in 60 weeks. I don't know how you can even run a business when you can't produce product in less than a year for stuff that ought to be on the shelf.

Someone told me that the reason for the long delay is because they are moving production to Singapore. I have no idea how true that is. I hear all kinds of stuff from marketing and sales people that turn out to be completely false later on. So I don't know where this came from but I would guess it came from some sales or marketing guy either in the distribution chain or from AB directly.

It does not appear to me that the China situation is getting any better as far as parts delivery goes. It actually seems to be getting worse, even with companies trying to disentangle themselves with China.

There are a few companies that apparently either saw this coming or just decided to get out of China early on and they have had pretty good luck but even companies that got out of China or are getting out are still having problems because they can't ship stuff economically from where they are being built in the far East because of the mess at the ports on the west coast.
 
Yes, its fun. A long time customer needed an AB VFD replacement for a submersible well....January of '23.
I called around and found a Yaskawa 40 miles away but we waited an hour to purchase. Sold. Next available in 10 to 12 weeks.
We managed to temp in an older Altivar and the well driller found a Franklin not too far out. I think they are going to take over the project. I'm all but retired so NBD to me.
 
Chips, plastic pellets, anything with silver content, steel, nuts and bolts, the list is deep and long of unavailable sub-components that go into so many of the finished goods products. The word of the year now is “decommitted”, meaning suppliers commit to deliveries, then “decommit” when it gets time to ship them. I have a customer wanting to buy over 100 drives for a new machine they are designing, we just had to tell them they will not be available until Q3 of 2023. They still have to deliver, so they are evaluating other drives that they would otherwise have never considered.
 
petersonra said:
I don't know how you can even run a business when you can't produce product in less than a year for stuff that ought to be on the shelf.
Click to expand...
You can't except that not many other manufacturers can do it either.

Maybe it is time to rethink our choices of which two are most important: quality, price, or delivery.
 
jim dungar said:
You can't except that not many other manufacturers can do it either.

Maybe it is time to rethink our choices of which two are most important: quality, price, or delivery.
Click to expand...
At this point there is no price that will get you delivery in a reasonable period of time for many products. I have not noticed the quality changing any, but I have noticed that the price for used parts on eBay has gone up to the point where whatever is left is three or four times the price we were paying our supplier for brand new parts.

There seem to be some manufacturers that somehow are managing to make stuff and have it available for sale. But when you have machines that are designed around certain parts it's very difficult to change them. Plus end users that buy a new machine of the same style want the same parts because they don't want to have to stock a bunch of spare parts that are different.

If you look on automationDirect you can get a lot of stuff pretty quick because it's in stock but other things aren't. AB has almost nothing in stock, and even mundane things like contact blocks for push buttons can be 6 months out. Even the supply of used and remanufactured parts has dribbled away to almost nothing left. We had one customer who was desperate enough that he bought a part from a supplier in China for a control logic system. When he installed it it went up in smoke, literally.
 
tom baker said:
How is ABs competition, Siemens, ABB, Danfoss, etc, on drive availability?
Click to expand...
AB seems to be the worst of the bunch. That's not real surprising because they don't really make much anymore. Basically they just put their name on something other people make. And what little they do make is mostly made in the far East. The other companies you mentioned often make stuff globally. So while they are still having issues they have factories all over the world making things as long as they can get the components. I think about the only Allen Bradley stuff we don't have trouble getting is terminal blocks.
 
AB makes their own larger drives (Powerflex 7xxx) and MV drives. The smaller PF4xx and 5xx series are made by others though. That's the case with most small "component class" drives by the way. Asian drive mfrs can mass produce those little drives so inexpensively that the major players just make deals with them to produce for them. They are not really brand labeling because those mfrs don't sell the same product under their own name (most of the time), it's just an economy of scale thing.

I just had a project (a bunch of large 18 pulse drives) handed to me that we had quoted A-B drives on and lost to Eaton almost a year ago. They pulled the job from Eaton because they cannot even tell them when they can deliver the drives. We told them 26 weeks on the A-B drives, they said that was better than any other delivery they were quoted.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top