After a few months of depressing corporate earnings reports, many in the technology sector are now busy working on Plan B, trying to turn adversity to their advantage. No matter how shiny the proverbial silver lining, we know there will be few bright spots on the immediate horizon.

One recurring theme is collaboration, best described as (innovative) ways to increase efficiency through cooperation along the supply chain.

Collaboration is an interesting concept, something that potentially every company can use to help expand its presence and provide better products and services to its customers. The form and substance of the collaborative venture can be (and often is) as fundamentally different as the companies that undertake the projects. Collaboration relies on the commonly accepted first principle of crisis management: Get back to basics and do what you do best. Partners each bring a unique proficiency to the table and in cooperation bring a product or service to the market. In the process, companies ensure that the customer receives the best-available products and services the collaborative entity can supply.

Collaboration is, of course, not a new idea in business, but it is often viewed with a healthy dose of reservation. Collaboration requires ample trust between partners that may have considered the other a competitor only a short time before. In the chemical industry, it has been said the delineation between dark-age alchemy and the time of enlightenment was not the quality or quantity of knowledge but simply how much each inventor trusted the other and how well new information flowed. Successful collaboration requires not only this shared information but also some amount of shared expectation to guide the partners’ conduct and provide common ground on which to evaluate results.

In the early 1990s, there was an interesting collaborative venture that focused on the best-in-class expertise of PCB fabricators and chemical suppliers called chemical and/or materials management. The concept, borrowed from the semiconductor industry, was embraced by the few remaining large OEMs. Applications stretched from PCB fabrication to waste treatment to cabinet plating and through to final product assembly. The OEM focused on the task of making a circuit board, computer or car, while Tier One chemical suppliers took control of the chemical and materials management, spanning from placing the order through daily analysis and inventory management, each doing what they do best.

Another, perhaps more familiar model, in our industry is when fabricators increase partnering activities with complementary companies that supply different products. In this relationship, erstwhile rivals find creative ways to cooperate to supply the customer with the best products, brought from each company’s specific best-in-class portfolio. Many of these same companies are continuing to integrate other products and services into these product offerings through collaboration with design teams, assemblers and other supply-chain partners, all with the intent on better servicing the customer. After all, at the end of the day, it’s the customer who makes (or breaks) any business.

There are many more examples of collaborations, and often they follow on the heels of failed new product introductions. We all have our horror stories – the redesign that didn’t get carried back through MCAD, preventing the resulting PCB from fitting in the old housing design, or the layout change that blocks the location of the mounting pins. We lose time and money while products are redesigned and new boards brought forward to complete the project, late and over budget.

Inevitably, when these things happen, companies vow to do a better job next time. Corrective action programs, often based on improved communication, find their way to the top to the remedy list. But today the challenge is bigger. Today, for some companies, the cost of a missed opportunity or the re-spin overrun may be the difference between survival and going out-of-business.

There has never been a better time for fundamental change. Innovative collaboration within the supply base and across the supply chain is one way for PCB designers, fabricators and assemblers along with the supply base, to take action to make more of what resources they have at hand. We are going to see quite a few inventive partnerships over the next year, as imaginative companies turn adversity into advantage by finding new ways to exceed customer expectations. And those companies pushing the envelope might not be the first ones that leap to mind.