Be it a startup or an established brand, having the right sourcing partner plays a vital role in the timely development of a product and supplying it to the customers. Hence the availability of a strong inventory becomes the game changer for component distributors to attract customers in the highly competitive market. Haresh Abichandani, managing director of Millennium Semiconductors shares with Baishakhi Dutta of the Electronicsforu.com Network how the organisation is equipping themselves to meet the growing customer demand. Excerpt follows…
Q) What’s unique about your team (or firm) that’s beneficial for customers to do business with you?
Millennium Semiconductors is a 24 years young and energetic organisation who have structured ourselves in segments based on the business units in the right windows. In a nutshell, this enables accountability on our end which is of utmost importance for serving the customers.
Q) What’s your strategy w.r.t. keeping ready stock of in-demand products for your customers?
In this ever-evolving industry, our strategies are aligned with the upcoming government regulations. We are the authorised distributor for more than 50 suppliers. Apart from carrying the inventory as per our customer schedules, we plan inventory which has high lead time or are proprietary parts. At the same time, we also plan adequate buffers for the peak seasons where there is a surge in the demand. We manage our inventory in a systematic manner, based on our experience of more than 2 decades in this industry.
Q) Do you cater to startups who may not have orders matching your MoQs? If yes, how do you handle them?
We encourage start-ups. When it comes to breaking the MOQ, we prefer to sell on the basis of SPQ (standard pack quantity). We thoroughly evaluate the project and depending on the potential of the project, we take a call and handle all the requirements.
Q) In which all cities do you have offices? How do you cater to service customers who are located outside the cities your offices are in?
Our headquarter is in Pimpri, Pune, apart from which we have 2 branch offices in Delhi and Bengaluru, 7 SOHO offices and 2 overseas offices. We also have a 1,00,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Chakan, Pune and another 40,000 sq. ft. one in Delhi.
Our offices are strategically located, enabling us to serve our customers located Pan-India flawlessly with our frontend team of sales, product marketing engineers and field application engineers.
Q) What’s your strategy w.r.t. providing samples to customers who may want to try them out in their designs? How do you enable the same?
We do offer samples to our customers as per requirements or as proposed by our frontrunners to them. Basically, we have 2 strategies – first being complete sample bank wherein the customers can make a request and purchase the sample after discussion with our FAEs by giving the complete details of the project.
Our second offering is where we offer the sample kits for all passives to our prime customers who have huge IDHOs and R&D centres.
Q) Do you have a team to help customers in designing their products? If yes, what role does this team play in building relationships with customers?
We have a separate team to meet the designing requirements of our customers in 2 ways – we have an FAE team which reaches out to the customer, understands the design requirement and often hand-hold the customer to fulfill the requirements. If this is not enough, we take it up with our suppliers and liaison between them till the task is completed successfully.
Other than that, we have different business units which work with our in-house application engineers’ team which build entire designs from scratch as per the requirement of the customers and provide complete solutions.
Apart from carrying the inventory as per our customer schedules, we plan for inventory which has high lead time or is for proprietary parts
Q) What are the top 3 qualities you would advise to customers while choosing the right sourcing partner?
We believe that for any business to flourish and run impeccably, the right sourcing partner is of paramount importance. One must be sure that the sourcing partner is reliable, genuine with credibility and in addition to being authorised. This will lead to seamless working.
Q) How’s been the growth of your organisation in the last 2 years? And, how do you see it for this financial year?
Since the past decade, we have been steadily growing at a CAGR of 20 per cent, which includes the last 2 years as well.
As for this financial year, we have steep targets and with our teamwork, we would positively achieve our milestone.
Q) What’s your leadership style? What’re the best management practices that you’ve adopted?
I believe our team is our first customer and biggest stakeholder and to be successful teamwork is the key. Participative leadership inspires team members to put in their all and work towards achieving goals. We follow transparent accountable processes, which makes it very easy for us to empower our team to take collective decision with the management.
The best practice would be to build leadership within the team and lead with passion to achieve the common goal.
Q) Any major initiatives taken in the last financial year that you’d like to share with our audience?
In the last financial year, we have built a 1,00,000 sq. ft warehouse in Chakan moved towards digitalisation with bringing most of our systems online and working towards a better society with more initiatives of CSR.
Q) What are your key focus areas for the next financial year?
Our key focus areas would be to build stronger support teams, to work with our customers even more closely by building a bigger FAE and AE teams and to completely digitize our systems and processes.
Q) Any views on current government policies related to import-export, GST and electronics manufacturing?
So far, the initiatives taken by the Government have been pretty positive like the Make in India or policies on electric vehicles. There are some challenges at the ground level, but these are being addressed and we hope to continue with the same.
