IEMI Readies Its Anti-Counterfeit Plan
IEMI Readies Its Anti-Counterfeit Plan
The International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative, an association of semiconductor OEMs, claims to have new ways to keep counterfeit components out of your supply chain. If it doesn't, it won't be for lack of effort. First envisioned way back in 2011, the project called for companies to donate a small amount of staff time -- about three hours a week -- to analyzing data from supply chain operations. The goal was to identify where the fake goods were most likely to wiggle into the production process. At first they identified four types of products that appeared most appealing to counterfeiters. "Manufacturing shortfall and product shortages, high value products; obsolete, discontinued, and legacy devices; and options or upgrades" were the most often targeted, they found.
This makes intuitive sense in some cases, but was contradictory in others. A shortage situation always creates chaos, and a solution to an unexpected shortage is always an appealing thing for an OEM to hear from a supplier. Due diligence lags in those situations.Similarly, obsolete products get less scrutiny, because they're no longer profit centers.But the high value and upgrade-related products were surprising. These are the products OEMs are most keen to defend. They were getting targeted successfully anyway.
Of perhaps more concern, some of these highest value electronics were coming from the aerospace, medical, and defense industries. There, the cloned or copied technology wasn't just valuable and proprietary -- it also carried a higher level of legal sensitivity, and ultimately, literal risk for the end user.
Understanding the risk
The result was an effort to, first, get some idea of how the problem's size: a reliable metric that would "enable iNEMI members to assess the risk of counterfeit use in their respective industries, the risk of untrusted sources of supply in that industry and generate the total cost of ownership associated with those risks."
In other words: Everyone knew this was a problem. But how big was it, and where were the trigger points?
That's the information the organization is going to talk about in an upcoming series of webinars in which it's recruiting companies to help plan and participate in the ongoing research. Though the process began as a concept more than two years ago, the work itself is only now underway.
A call for participation is still open. It requires an application and admittance by the project's managers. The goal is to finally draw a kind of map of where the leaks are in the electronics supply chain. Not company-by-company, but industry-by-industry. It's an ambitious idea, but a bottom line goal: improve the integrity of each product, and the industry in aggregate. 1
1. "IEMI Readies Its Anti-Counterfeit Plan:Herman ." EBN 7 June 2013
Similar to the efforts of IEMI, Lintech has taken a proactive role in combating the problem of counterfeit parts from entering the supply chain. Lintech takes counterfeiting seriously, and understands the severity of non-authentic product present in today’s market. To solve this problem, Lintech has developed a multi-layered, zero-tolerance, proprietary counterfeit avoidance program called the Component Authenticity Protection Program, or C.A.P.P.
Emerging in the industry over 20 years ago, Lintech has positioned itself as a trusted global distributor of both mil-aerospace and commercial electronic components. Since “some of these highest value electronics are coming from the aerospace, medical, and defense industries”, our main focus at Lintech is to not only protect our highly valued customers in these industries from receiving sub-standard product, but to identify and eliminate the acquisition of spurious components altogether.
Shauna Ryan
Lintech Components
VP of Marketing
631-580-9500
ShaunaR@Lintechcomponents.com
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