This can be a challenge with today’s supply chain issues. Many components and sensors used in a smart switch have long lead times, sometimes a year or more and/or prices have increased as well as transportation costs. The price increases can be 20% to over 100%. Clearly this requires absorbing some of the costs to try and maintain a reasonable end user price, but some of the cost must be passed on to be able to sustain a viable business.

One key to being able to ride out the current storm is to have designed a product with as many second source (manufactured and available from multiple vendors) components as possible. For single sourced components, it is essential to have created business relationships to ensure preferential supply and pricing. A significant advantage is to not have designed a product that relies on a custom assembly, such as a custom touch screen. Such a custom assembly has supply chain issues in its own manufacture and availability of production line capacity.

The remaining alternative is to redesign areas of the electronics to utilize a different component that is available. This creates its own issues: the design needs to be qualified for reliability and the product may need to be re-qualified with the standards such as FCC and UL/ETL. These create delays and additional cost. The risk is that the new component itself becomes in high demand and no longer available. This leads to a “cat and mouse” game with no clear winner.

These are challenging times indeed.