I once worked for a company on a remote island where JIT stock control was impossible - ships only every three months, and no airport. So you ordered what you thought you would need for at least six months in advance. With car parts, there was often a minimum order, so you took whatever was required: consequently, when, in 1967, a new tie rod end was needed for a 1949 Ford Prefect, no problem! Just went to the engineering store and dug one out from the back shelves. Sometimes having old stock was a godsend - but not when it came to the wine stock, which had been shipped from South Africa twenty years before, but stored in the hottest, most humid part of the entire island - so down the drain it went.
John in Brisbane -----Original Message----- From: PDML [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Roberts Sent: Wednesday, 20 April 2016 10:42 To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Shipping notice from B&H mike wilson wrote: >> On 19 April 2016 at 17:34 Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> John <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >I doubt that will affect the front end of the delivery queue. Those >> >cameras have already been shipped, and besides I'm pretty sure >> >Pentax assembles the K-1 in the Philippines or Vietnam. >> > >> >It might affect those of us who are/were planning on waiting for a >> >bit before buying. >> >> It wouldn't surprise me if Sony had already made every sensor that's >> ever going to go into a K-1. Update cycles are pretty short these >> days. > >You guys never heard of Just In Time stock control? Nobody carries >excess stock these days. I certainly have (having worked in Components Engineeering in a past life) but that isn't likely in this situation. Changing a large, complex fab for something like a 24mm x 36mm sensor is a massive undertaking, so it's done as rarely as practical. For a relatively low demand yet high complexity device like this any requests for Just in Time delivery are going to be laughed at. Sony will run the fab for a set period of time, fulfilling the orders that have been placed, and that will likely be it for the year (or some lengthy period of time). By the way, the company I worked for in Rochester was bitten by overzealous pursuit of the "inventory is evil" mindset many times. They'd have some exotic (expensive) RF semiconductors left after a production run and promptly sell them off to a broker, despite warnings from myself and others in the Components Engineering Department. A few years later we'd get an order for a new batch of the same product and discover, to the bean counter's surprise but not mine, that the exotic part had been obsoleted and that, short of re-engineering the same product all over again, our only choice was to buy the semiconductors back from the same broker we sold them to - at literally 10 times the price. This happened repeatedly. In the case of highly specialized parts, sometimes inventory doesn't depreciate but actually increases in value. They never learned. -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
