Customer:  The company is a leader in autonomous robot and drone perception and communication systems.

Featured products: Flash memory ICs, Connectors, Various Components

Customer Experience:  

  • Instrumental in identifying and purchasing hard-to-find parts
  • Highly trusted partner with industry peers 
  • Key member of the sourcing team

Parts procurement is everything in a business where product management is core to operations, and downtime can directly affect a company’s bottom line. When this AI company embarked on a journey to identify a procurement partner that understood their business requirements with the capabilities to quickly deliver, NetSource was ready. 

 

The Challenge – Sourcing the Right Components Quickly and Easily

As a startup company building with the latest technologies, sourcing components is a significant challenge specifically when it involves designing with mobile smartphone chipsets.  Much of the industry supply chain is concentrated overseas making it challenging at times to obtain parts, more so in smaller quantities, during the early design stages before ramping to production.  

Often, components from reference designs are difficult to source when they have unique part numbers or are only available overseas.  Many of the company executives had previously worked for enterprise level organizations where dedicated purchasing and sourcing functions were in place to manage the procurement needs of the company.  

“As a startup, we needed to find efficient ways to perform obtaining parts without those dedicated internal resources,” recalls the Vice President of Hardware Engineering.  “We needed partners Like NetSource in order to scale our business.”

 

The Solution – Deliver Seamless Access to Hard-to-Find Parts in the US + Overseas 

The AI company is in the business of developing highly-integrated AI-powered modules that empower organizations in a variety of industries to utilize aerial and ground autonomous navigations systems that communicate via 4G and 5G cellular networks.  When they sought out a procurement organization that had global access and was turnkey ready to deliver the mission-critical parts needed to develop and build their robotic products and supporting technologies, they chose NetSource.  

The NetSource promise to customers is to deliver excellence through its personalized service and commitment to serving as an extension of the internal team over simply operating as a go-to vendor.  “NetSource has provided excellent customer service and has consistently been able to find us hard-to-get parts. They have access to a great variety of parts both in the US and overseas,” He explained. 

 

Business Results – Decreasing Lead Time from Months to Days

Working with NetSource, the AI company is able to focus on their core business over spending time and resources seeking and securing the components they need.  

“NetSource also assisted us in obtaining parts in smaller quantities for our initial builds.  As a startup, we needed to manage expenditures as our business developed and as we moved from initial builds into production.  Some of the parts we needed had large minimum quantity buys in the thousands of parts when we were looking for a only a few hundred parts for our initial builds.”    

  • Part procurement decreased from months to days which eliminates delays in the development of robotics products and their respective technologies due to long lead times
  • NetSource’s connection with major component vendors also assists the AI company in obtaining information to identify equivalent parts with multiple part numbers 
  • The inspection + quality processes NetSource employs ensures that parts delivered are correct and of the highest quality