Stay Connected to Your Supply Chain

Global supply chain management is no easy feat. This article details recent difficulties at overseas factories, and lays out some potential solutions for companies to better manage their suppliers and their supply chain. Each step involves additional – though certainly necessary – action on the part of the principal to protect your investments, their products, and their business. We here at Etratech would like to present an alternative to the idea of placing the burden on the customer: the Total Acquisition Management (T.A.M.) system. Rather than placing the tasks of imparting a Supplier Code of Conduct, initiating collaboration with your supplier, and simply “turning risk into opportunity” to you, we manage all steps of the supply chain for you.

What does this mean? For starters, Etratech fully owns and operates our Asia facility. This means that a “Supplier Code of Conduct” that you would expect is already in place and monitored to our exacting standards, not those of another operator. Working with Etratech, you only have one step of research to ensure that your supplier is up to your standards, taking the guesswork out of wondering at just what kind of facility your parts are being manufactured

Next, collaboration with our customers is built into our service and philosophy. We reach out to you and your engineers at every step of the process to harness our collective expertise and ensure that we’re all on the right track toward meeting goals.

Finally, turning risk into opportunity is an optimistic and worthy goal, to be sure, but in uncertain times it can be easier said than done. By locking into Etratech’s expansive network of suppliers and stable supply chain via T.A.M., you’re mitigating much, if not all, of any risk involved.

Be sure to view our YouTube introduction for more information on T.A.M. and all of our other services.

Could Space Elevators Be in Our Future?

Why take a rocket ship when you could take a space elevator?

The futuristic space transportation system, first proposed more than 100 years ago and later popularized by science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, could lead to profoundly lower costs of launching anything into space, while increasing the amount of cargo capacity – both material and human – for orbital trips, estimates suggest.

A space elevator would likely involve a cable – aka a tether or ribbon – stretching from the surface of our planet into orbit. A recent BBC Future feature explained the basic concept: An anchor and Earth’s gravity at the lower end, plus a counterweight and centrifugal force at the top end, would keep the elevator’s tether taut and stationary over a fixed, ground-based station. Robotic “climbers” would then ascend the ribbon from the surface, through the stratosphere and into space, potentially powered by lasers.

Among the major challenges this massive engineering plan faces: creating long strands of an extremely strong but lightweight material to construct the cable, as well figuring out how to operate the system.

As a manufacturer dedicated to innovative design and manufacture of electronic controls, Etratech understands the need for BIG ideas. And today’s innovative thinkers, dreamers and doers are working to make this particular one a reality.

The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), a consortium of organizations and individuals worldwide promoting the development, construction and operation of a space elevator, organized the 2012 Space Elevator Conference in Seattle, Wash., in August. The annual conference engages an international audience of scientists, engineers, inventors, educators, entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and students in discussions of space elevator development. The theme of this year’s conference: “Space Elevator Operations and Maintenance.”