Supply chain disruptions may be inevitable, but the ability to design around them doesn’t have to be an afterthought.
If it feels like supply chains are back in the headlines again, that’s because they are. Only this time it’s not a pandemic driving the disruption; it’s geopolitics.
The current conflict between the US and Iran is yet another reminder of how interconnected and fragile the global electronics ecosystem has become. Semiconductor manufacturing depends on complex networks of raw materials, fabrication capacity, assembly operations, transportation infrastructure and energy resources spread across multiple regions of the world. When instability affects any one of those areas, the consequences can ripple across the entire product development lifecycle.
For those of us involved in electronics design, however, none of this should come as a surprise.
We’ve lived through it before. And if the past several years have taught us anything, it’s that supply chain volatility is no longer an exception to plan around – it has become a baseline design condition.
Let me rewind to a story I’ve shared before because, unfortunately, it remains just as relevant today. Early in the Covid era, I was leading PCB layout on a project that should have been relatively straightforward. Requirements were stable. The customer was well known. The design itself wasn’t pushing technological boundaries.
Yet we redesigned that board 12 separate times. Not because requirements changed. Not because the design failed electrically. Not because manufacturing discovered a problem. We redesigned it because components kept disappearing.
Every time we thought we were ready to move forward, another part of the BoM became unavailable. Approved alternates disappeared. Lead times stretched beyond acceptable limits. Parts that looked secure one week became unattainable the next.
The result was a constant cycle of schematic updates, library requests, engineering reviews, and layout rework. For months, the most common phrase heard during project meetings was simple: “Another part on the BoM isn’t available.”
At the time, many organizations viewed this as a temporary disruption. Looking back, it was exposing a much larger weakness in how we develop products.
While component shortages create immediate challenges, they also expose something deeper: many engineering organizations still operate with workflows built for a more predictable world.
The traditional process remains largely sequential. Engineering designs the product. Layout progresses. Momentum builds. Then, the supply chain and procurement perform a detailed BoM assessment focused on availability, lifecycle status, lead times and cost. For years, this approach worked reasonably well. Today, it increasingly does not.
When a significant portion of the BoM suddenly becomes unavailable, the process enters a familiar cycle of stop, rework, restart and repeat. Engineering loses momentum. Schedules slip. Resources are consumed by redesign activity rather than innovation.
As a PCB designer, I have experienced this firsthand. By the time those discoveries occur, engineering effort has already been invested. The layout has progressed. Constraints have been validated. Decisions have been made. The later the issue is discovered, the more expensive the correction becomes. This is precisely why supply chain resilience can no longer be treated as a downstream activity. It has become an engineering consideration.
Breaking Organizational Silos
One of the most persistent challenges I have observed throughout my career is the separation between engineering and supply chain functions. Engineering operates in one domain.
Procurement operates in another. Supply chain teams operate in yet another. Each group possesses valuable information, but that information often arrives too late to influence the decisions that matter most.
Meanwhile, engineers frequently attempt to compensate for this lack of visibility themselves. They search distributor websites, compare availability across suppliers, review lifecycle notices, and build their own spreadsheets to assess risk. The problem isn’t a lack of effort. The problem is a lack of connected intelligence.
Modern product development requires more than isolated expertise. It requires visibility across traditionally disconnected functions so decisions can be made with complete context rather than assumptions.
This is where the conversation shifts less from procurement and more toward engineering methodology. The objective is not to turn engineers into buyers. The objective is to provide engineers with actionable component intelligence at the point where design decisions are being made.
When engineers have visibility into availability trends, lifecycle status, supplier concentration, pricing volatility and risk factors while selecting components, the quality of those decisions improves significantly. More importantly, the cost of change remains low. This represents a fundamental shift from reactive BoM validation toward continuous component intelligence integrated directly into the design process.
Much like design reuse, automation, and abstraction have transformed other aspects of engineering productivity, supply chain intelligence must become part of the broader engineering workflow rather than a disconnected downstream activity. Organizations that successfully make this transition will spend less time recovering from disruptions and more time delivering innovation.
Covid also revealed another important lesson: reacting to uncertainty can be just as costly as the uncertainty itself. Many organizations responded to shortages by adopting aggressive purchasing strategies to secure inventory months or even years in advance. While understandable, these decisions often created new risks.
When designs changed, requirements shifted or technologies evolved, companies found themselves carrying inventory they could no longer effectively use. Capital became trapped. Flexibility decreased. Margins suffered.
This highlights an important reality that experienced engineers eventually learn: Good design decisions cannot be separated from cost, risk, manufacturability, and supply chain considerations. Engineering does not operate independently from business outcomes. It directly influences them.
A Permanent Change in the Design Environment
The current geopolitical environment simply reinforces what many engineering organizations should already recognize. Global supply chains have become increasingly interconnected, complex and vulnerable to disruption.
Whether the catalyst is geopolitical conflict, trade restrictions, tariffs, natural disasters, climate events, transportation bottlenecks or future pandemics is almost beside the point. The source of disruption may change. The existence of disruption will not. This means uncertainty itself has become a design constraint. And like any design constraint, it must be accounted for early, continuously and deliberately.
Designing for supply chain resilience is not about predicting the future. It is about making better decisions with the information available today. It means bringing risk awareness upstream. It means replacing assumptions with visibility. It means reducing rework instead of repeatedly absorbing it. Most importantly, it means recognizing that resilience is no longer solely a supply chain objective. It is an engineering discipline.
The organizations that thrive in the years ahead will not be the ones that react fastest to disruption. They will be the ones who design resilience into their processes, workflows, and engineering decisions from the beginning.
Because in a world where uncertainty has become a permanent design constraint, resilience is not something to bolt on at the end. It is something to intentionally design in from the start.
Stephen Chavez is a senior printed circuit engineer with three decades’ experience. In his current role as a senior product marketing manager with Siemens EDA, his focus is on developing methodologies that assist customers in adopting a strategy for resilience. He is an IPC Certified Master Instructor Trainer (MIT) for PCB design, IPC CID+, and a Certified Printed Circuit Designer (CPCD). He is chairman of the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA); This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. He will speak on a variety of design topics at PCB West in September.
