Shipping lead times

Resurrecting an old thread...

I'd ordered one through RS on the 1st July, they said despatch expected within 12 weeks.. So I'd mostly forgotten about it until today when they sent a "shipping delay" email:

Since receiving your order, we have been advised that our next batch of approximately 40,000 Raspberry Pi’s will now be arriving during September, with further deliveries expected in October. This delay is due to the very high level of demand on the core Raspberry Pi processor chip. Unfortunately, this means that your order could be delayed by up to 9 weeks, although we are trying to reduce this as much as possible. We have updated the delivery schedule displayed in our FAQ's and on the Raspberry Pi forum. As soon as we receive confirmation of any improvements from our manufacturers, we will advise you.

Interesting as it's the first actual confirmation I've seen that there's supply constraints on the SoC - plenty of speculation though.

With an additional delay of 9 weeks, that'll make 5 months give or take..   I'm forced to wonder how Farnell seemed to get the backlog sorted fairly quickly, back in july it appeared that the wait was around a week if not less, and they're still showing delivery within 3 weeks and a 19day lead time further in the site.

Anyone got any clue what's up here ?  There seems to be quite a disconnect between RS & Farnell. Did some forward thinking buyer at Farnell go and buy up all the supply for the next year back in March or what ?

Why do I get the feeling that it's Farnell building 4000 per day while RS are building something daft like 200 per day...

It's very hard to find theories able to explain that disparity between RS and Farnell, partly because so few facts have been made public.  My pet theory offers one possible mechanism, but I'm not at all convinced that it's related to reality.  We just don't have enough information to judge.

For what it's worth (which isn't much) ...

Premises: (NB. These are not  facts, only premises for a theory.  They would need verification.)

1. On the day of Pi launch and the few troubled days that followed, RS managed to keep their website up and accepting Registrations of Interest substantially more of the time than Farnell.
2. The total number of Pi boards that can be manufactured per month corresponds to the fab rate of the BCM2835 SoC, and is limited by it.
3. RPF have a policy of supplying identical numbers of BCM2835 devices to both partners.

Inferences:  If the above premises are true, then the following would also probably be true:

• RS received hugely more Registrations of Interest than Farnell.
• RS cannot manufacture Pi boards at a higher rate than Farnell (even if they wanted to) because supply rate of BCM2835 from RPF/Broadcom to them is fixed.
• RS's lead times are longer than Farnell's simply because they have more orders to fill.

Not rocket science, a very simple arithmetic relationship there.

If the above is true, then it's a very unfortunate situation for RS, because they're being penalized for having done better than Farnell on the 29th February.  For both partners to have similar lead times, RPF would have to apportion BCM2835 SoCs to them in volumes proportional to their respective backlogs.

Any other possible theories?  The one about RS manufacturing fewer than Farnell is a possible candidate too, but the trouble with it is that I can't see any possible reason why they would do so, since it provides no benefits.

Morgaine.

IMHO you have to add another variable to your hypothesis, as far as I remember and for personal experience Farnell has been a substiantially better electronics distributor and well managed company than RS.

I also believe that Farnell/element14/Newark has a better and more organized worldwide distribution network.

My .02

-J

I don't think we can judge that.  We're much closer to Farnell here and not able to see what RS are doing in an even-handed way.  What's more, "better" is not a quantitative metric that you can map directly to satisfying deliveries more quickly.  I'm not aware of any objective reason to think that RS is (dis)organized in a way that can slow deliveries despite the boards being manufactured at the same rate as Farnell.  It's a good company.  I think there must be more solid reasons for what we are seeing.

For what it is worth, CPC here in the UK seem to be able to supply them from stock at the moment. Someone here where I work had one on order from RS, got a similar message as above asking him to wait until November. I'd had an e-mail from CPC regarding stock, so he cancelled his order with RS and ordered from CPC - two days later two Pi's arrived ! From what I recall, CPC are part of Farnell, so if they have Pi's to spare...?

Steve

Edit: CPC now showing as awaiting  stock on 31st August.

I know and I'm in daily contact with people that do a substantial amount of businees with both companies, in my company we use other distributors, personally I ordered few things (among the two R-pi's) from Newark/element14/Farnell.

While Farnell is not the best distributor I often hear compliments, on the other hand with RS I often hear complains, and their DesignSpark website is a far cry to be something usable and featured like what we enjoy from element14.

My .02

-J

Well now you have the "official word" I guess ...

From http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=15956

"Only thing I would add is that RS are simply a distributor who have got it wrong. They didn't design the board, and there is another distributor who has got it right."

-J

Well now you have the "official word" I guess ...

From http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=15956

"Only thing I would add is that RS are simply a distributor who have got it wrong. They didn't design the board, and there is another distributor who has got it right."

-J

Well now you have the "official word" I guess ...

Wow.. that's not exactly something I ever expected to see.   At 'day job' if I'd just publically said something like that about a supplier I'd have two burly security guards watching me clear my desk shortly afterwards.

It's not a "normal" customer / supplier relationship though, is it?

And perhaps jamesh is feeling a bit careworn today. I did have a bit of a smirk at the frankness of his post.

Who knows... Even if RS operates with "leaner" stock then a lack of SOC's would have been evident to them via their pet factory a while ago. Typical business - don't let on about low stock for fear of losing potential orders, even though you can't fulfil those orders anyway.

Meanwhile, somewhere in China:

"It looks like we're going to have to make some more BCM2835's."

"What? We only ever had one customer for them and even they didn't want them all. There was a snotload left over"

"They're all gone, so we need to bake some more. Go get the masks for them"

"Masks? I thought you had the masks..."

etc.

jamodio wrote:

 

Well now you have the "official word" I guess ...

 

From http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=15956

 

"Only thing I would add is that RS are simply a distributor who have got it wrong. They didn't design the board, and there is another distributor who has got it right."

 

-J

Good god, those are JamesH's words.

Openly criticising a manufacturing partner like that is pretty unprofessional.  I wonder how RPF would like it if Farnell or RS openly blogged about how RPF is an organization who "have got it wrong" in their board design, and that there is another low-cost ARM board outfit "who has got it right".

Nothing from that quarter surprises me much anymore, but apparently they're as bad at company relations as we know them to be at community relations.

I tell you, I'm still trying to understand what reasons lie behind such behavior, and wonder if the alleged "SM" journalist took the time to go through some of his responses on the RPF forum where he in particular treats people with the utmost lack of respect, particularly people that with the hype and buzz generated by the R-Pi are venturing to experiment and learn.

I was reading the response to a question from a person from Portugal, trying to understand the difference between a microcontroller based board and the R-Pi and the very first response was from him, really pathetic and with an attitude that may shutdown any interest from people trying to learn.

Also I don't have a clue who the other moderator "mahjongg" is, but while he has a better attitude the content of some of his reponses are many times, well, clueless.

He is the one that after many other users tried to reason and demonstrate to him that the R-Pi had thermal issues, that using heatsinks was a potential solution, and that USB didn't work as expected, finally admited he was wrong.

About distributors, I found that MCM was very corteous and willing to communicate and provide good service, another plus for a company that is part of Farnell.

-J