“The team at Alliance Memory have gone out
of their way to support us not only with the highest level of customer service but also with their willingness to work with us on pricing and our requirements for delivery,” says Bob Chaffet, Purchasing Manager at Accutron Inc.
Challenge/Solution
Accutron is a Northeast leader in contract manufacturing of printed circuit board assemblies. From prototype to production, the company consistently provides high quality products at very competitive prices to help its customers reduce their time to market. To maintain its commitment of excellence to its customers, Accutron requires its component suppliers to meet the highest standards of quality while meeting aggressive targets for pricing.
From the Customer
“The team at Alliance Memory have gone out of their way to support us not only with the highest level of customer service but also with their willingness to work with us on pricing and our requirements for delivery,” says Bob Chaffet, Purchasing Manager at Accutron Inc. “The users of devices from Alliance Memory include one of our largest customers, in the medical industry, which relies on their SRAMs for medical instrumentation applications. One difference between Alliance Memory and other legacy IC manufacturers is that their management team has been working with these products for many years and knows them and the market for them inside out. This puts them in a position to give us sound intelligence on when memory ICs are going to go EOL and what the alternatives are to replace them without disrupting our business or our customers’ business. It makes a huge difference for us to have in Alliance Memory a supplier that we know is going to be there when we need them, and who can step up and provide us with new product when we need it.”
About Accutron
Accutron is a leader in contract manufacturing of printed circuit board assemblies including SMT, through-hole, and box build assemblies. Based in Windsor, Connecticut, the company was founded in 1989 and today has 130 employees and more than $25 million in annual sales.
“We look to Alliance any time we have an EOL situation with a memory chip, since they’ve been great so far in terms of service and delivery and offer really good continuing support for any products we buy from them,” says John Prior, strategic procurement management at ADVA Optical Networking.
ADVA Optical Networking’s customers include more than 10,000 enterprises and more than 250 carriers and service providers including British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Level(3) Communications, Next Gen Networks, Nokia Siemens, NTT, TATA Communications, and Time Warner Cable. These are companies that need solutions that will last for years, even as the IC technology available on the market continues to evolve. So end-of-life for components is an issue ADVA Optical Networks has to deal with all the time—especially with memory chips—and having a reliable source for the legacy SRAMs used in its Ethernet access products is critical.
“We qualified Alliance Memory several years ago when we were caught in a pinch by a supplier going end-of-life on a critical component,” says John Prior, strategic procurement management at ADVA Optical Networking. “Now we look to them any time we have an EOL situation with a memory chip, since they’ve been great so far in terms of service and delivery and offer really good continuing support for any products we buy from them. When our engineering team needs to find a replacement for EOL SRAMs in particular, Alliance Memory has become their go-to source because they know who they’re dealing with and that Alliance Memory will offer us a good solution.”
Plexus customers come from most major industries using electronics, including networking and communications, healthcare/life sciences, test and measurement, control automation, energy and energy management, point-of-sale systems, defense, security, and aerospace. Most of these in turn require memory ICs for new and existing designs, so having reliable sources of legacy products such as those manufactured by Alliance Memory is key to the Plexus business model.
“We use products from Alliance Memory pretty much across all of our market segments—and all of them need both SRAMs and DRAMs,” says Todd Donnermeyer, Global Commodity Manager at Plexus. “Not only does Alliance Memory provide us with an alternate source from a cost reduction standpoint, they excel in quality and service. They understand the importance of keeping key components available and have done well in continuing to add to their product portfolio as other manufacturers EOL various products. In my experience they’ve been very easy to work with and ready to go above and beyond.”