Atlanta, GA – ECIA’s Vice President of Industry Practices Don Elario hosted a webinar to provide updates on several important initiatives. The webinar began with a welcome from ECIA’s CEO David Loftus where he thanked ECIA member council and committee participants and provided an overview of association activities.

Next, Senior Vice President Victor Meijers explained the thinking behind the rebranding of ECIA’s authorized component website, Trustedparts.com. “The distributor council wanted to drive adoption outside the Americas,” he said. “We decided to remove the ECIA membership requirement, and that meant we needed a different name. The site looks different, but from a user experience it is the same. We continue to do very well; we have over 160,000 visitors who conduct over 3.5 million searches every month. There are 24 million unique part numbers from over 4000 manufacturers.”

Dale Ford then told attendees about the extensive surveys he has been conducting throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to collect data about the industry response. This important work enables members to understand how their peers are responding to the crisis. “There are still major concerns about the supply chain impact, the expectations for when offices will reopen, as well as attitudes toward business travel,” he noted. “We are also learning a lot about how companies are responding to remote working and how they view this both short term and long term. We also are finding out how companies are adopting best practices in vivid detail.”

Russ Dzielak, Director of Channel and Key Accounts next updated the audience about his committee’s work on the impact Covid-19 has had on sales interactions. “Our committee quickly realized that we are all facing the same challenge: how to operate our businesses with limited opportunities to meet face to face with customers and business partners,” he began. “We all of course wanted to understand how we could get back to meeting safely while protecting our sales force and customers. But we also wanted to train our sales force to better utilize the digital tools that have become so necessary.”

Don Elario then took the ‘podium’ to show progress on three critical initiatives. The modernization of the design registration initiative is on schedule with 14 companies participating. The committee expects to get to the end of the discovery phase of the project by the end of September. The second initiative, the Paperless Certificate of Compliance, is a 3-year plan, which is also right on schedule. It is currently in the testing and implementation phase with ADI and Mouser leading the way. The third topic Elario discussed was the two new ECIA Service Partners, The Trust Bridge and Compliance & Risks. These companies provide valuable resources to the membership on compliance and regulations exploding around the globe in IOT, AI, data security, the environment and much more.

This webinar is available at https://www.ecianow.org/webinars.

Register now for PCB West Virtual 2020, the leading conference and exhibition for the printed circuit board industry, coming this September. pcbwest.com