“We Do Support Startups If They Match Our Minimum Order Quantity”: Arrow

Ensuring an always-ready inventory and an effective online access to customers are important success tips for electronic component distributors. How can these be put to practice and what kind of benefits does these bring to customers? Sanjeev Keskar, managing director of Arrow Electronics India Pvt Ltd shares his thoughts with Baishakhi Dutta of the Electronicsforu.com Network as he talks about Arrow’s latest business endeavors.

Q. What’s unique about your team that’s beneficial for customers to do business with you?
As an organisation, we guide innovation forward for over 200,000 leading technology manufacturers and service providers. Our comprehensive technology lifecycle offerings and solutions portfolio include sensors, wireless connectivity, gateways and cloud platforms. Besides, we also offer solutions such as data ingestion, aggregation and visualization, analytics and security.

In addition, our service capabilities include ideation, design, integration, monitoring and managed services, as well as and sustainable and secure end of life cycle disposition. We also cover manufacturing, logistics, financing and wireless connectivity with billing services.

Q. How are you making your platform more accessible to customers? How are you harnessing your online domain?
Our goal is to provide best-in-class design-to-prototype-to-production entire lifecycle solutions and services, making it more accessible for engineers and innovators to create, make and manage the technology of tomorrow. We aim to provide the right technology and product to the right place at the right time with our best-in-class network of supply chain management tools and services.

Over the years we have strengthened ourself in inventory planning, process analysis, order automation, optimization of landed costs, global pricing and compliance, and transportation services. We are also equipped to provide on-site terminal and warehousing, electronic commerce, kitting, material planning and sourcing, and ship-to-dock logistics management.

MyArrow is an online and time-saving tool offering 24/7 access where customers can swiftly upload a list of parts (BOMs), buy a product, quote product, manage orders, research part specs on the go, and easily communicate with Arrow sales team.  Here are a number of features of MyArrow:

• Order management – Securely access up to one year of details for all online and offline orders including tracking numbers and invoice reprint.

• Bill of materials – Effortlessly upload the list of parts to take advantage of information tailored to your needs including your specific pricing and inventory.

• Product change – Notifications including changes in the life cycle of part, a change in the documentation or materials, and a change in the manufacturing process.

• Forecast response – Access to the Arrow supply chain supporting your forecasts including customizable reporting

• Purchase order upload – Easily upload your purchase order for quick processing increasing accuracy, turn-around time and securing of inventory.

• Quote – The ability to request quotes for a quick turn from Arrow Inside Sales Representative

Q. Do you cater to startups? If yes, how do you handle them?
We do support startups if they match our MoQs. But as we ship in original packing of the manufacturers we support orders in multiples of the minimum purchase quantity (MPQ) and the minimum order quantity (MOQ) specified by our suppliers.

Q. In which all cities do you have offices?
Arrow India is present in 7 cities with Bangalore being the headquarter for India. We have north regional headquarter at Delhi and west regional headquarter at Pune. We also have branch offices at Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Chennai. For the east region, we support from our Delhi office.

“We are also setting up an IoT Open Lab in collaboration with Software Technology Park of India (STPI) at Bangalore”

Q. What are your offerings and strategies to help your customers improve their design endeavors?
We offer seamless online to offline experience when it comes to design-to-prototype phase.  Arrow.com features millions of products available for sale globally with new inventory added daily.

Whether it is one, or any small quantities, components are available for prototyping, competitive pricing on the web, real-time engineering support. Datasheets for 300M+ products, over 40K reference designs, including 10K+  interactive via our enVision™ design tool Free OrCAD™ cloud-based schematics capture tool, revamped BOM tool featuring intelligent part matching & add-to-cart feature, thousands of articles and videos on engineering solutions with new content added daily.  Live video chat, real-time text, or email or engage with local Arrow Engineers for timely collaboration and technical support.

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 do have both in-house application team who can develop production-ready solutions for our customers as well as FAE team to extend complete technical support to our customers in their development work. We also bring an extensive network of design partners from around the APAC region.

Q. What are the top 3 qualities you would advise to customers while choosing the right sourcing partner?
The top three qualities that customers should consider are:

1. Local sales and technical support.
2. Global technology ecosystem network and capabilities
3. Supply chain logistic support

Q. Any major initiatives taken in the last financial year that you’d like to share with our audience?
As an example of empowering local innovators and engineers with access to design tools, resources, and engineering expertise that they are often short of, Arrow established its first open lab at Hong Kong Science Park in 2016. The lab has since served as a center of excellence for 800+ engineers to solve engineering problems and accelerate idea-to-prototype-to-production journey.

Arrow is currently expanding its global network of open labs in major technology and innovation hubs around the world, including China, India, Israel, and the U.S. We are also setting up an IoT Open Lab in collaboration with Software Technology Park of India (STPI) at Bangalore. The purpose of this is to support more than 500 startups that are working in the IoT Space. This lab will be operational in the second half of 2019.

Q. What are your key focus areas for the next financial year?
For the next financial year, we are betting high on industrial, automotive and the telecom space.