Chinese New Year (aka Lunar New Year or Spring Festival) is a welcome and well-deserved break for Chinese workers. However, it is also a notoriously stressful time for the global manufacturing industry. In today's episode, we give you a manufacturer's perspective of why it is usually such a disruptive period.
Links:
Some fun (non-manufacturing related) facts about Chinese New Year
Information on 2022 Chinese New Year closures
China post-Lunar New Year job exodus
pickplacepodcast.com
Chinese New Year (aka Lunar New Year or Spring Festival) is a welcome and well-deserved break for Chinese workers. However, it is also a notoriously stressful time for the global manufacturing industry. In today's episode, we give you a manufacturer's perspective of why it is usually such a disruptive period.
Links:
Some fun (non-manufacturing related) facts about Chinese New Year
Information on 2022 Chinese New Year closures
China post-Lunar New Year job exodus
pickplacepodcast.com
Welcome to the pick place podcast, a show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington
Melissa:and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub
Chris:Welcome back, Melissa,
Melissa:welcome back, Chris.
Chris:Here we go. Another year we have successfully circled the sun, go us.
Melissa:We have survived.
Chris:We've worked very hard to make sure that our planet made it around the sun again. And now that's called sarcasm in the biz. The whole new years thing always cracks me up. Every business person always talks about always be moving forward. Always look ahead, don't look at the past. And we're like, what is the one thing we always do at the very end of the year? We always look at the past year. It's like why are we looking at the past? Let's move ahead. I don't know. But yeah lots to do. I'm excited about this year. There's be lots of changes, like great changes, great projects. I'm excited about we're working on more to talk about in the future, but just some cool stuff. And I'm looking forward to it. I am, what's known as bullish about the future. We did have a good year though. We broke over 10,000 downloads last year, which was pretty cool. That's exciting. So thanks everybody for listening. I'm glad that you're enjoying it. Hope that you're enjoying it and that you're not just rage listening to it. That would be weird.
Melissa:I, of course, using it to cure your insomnia.
Chris:I think that's probably what half the audience is doing. So to the other half, thank you for listening. It's funny. I had a coworker tell me recently he goes, Chris, I think I found a nerdier podcast than yours. And I said, oh yeah, what's that? He said it's just a recording of a group of people while they play Dungeons and dragons. I said, actually, that doesn't sound nerdy at all. That actually sounds pretty cool. And he goes yeah, you're right. Your yours is definitely still nerdier. So, so thanks for that. But I wanted to address some bit of feedback we got on a recent episode. I don't know if it was the most recent episode. I think that it
Melissa:Yeah, it was,
Chris:Where we had a chance to interview Rob a British fellow that works with the Pico factory team circuit hubs factory. And, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of a let me get this off my chest kind of an episode. Right.'cause it was stuff that he deals with every single day and he wanted it. You wanted to share what it was and it was fun. And I enjoyed it and listening back to it. I enjoyed it. But it turns out it's touched a nerve with a few people particularly people who have struggled to manage those same things themselves. It's interesting. So one of the things he brought up was complications with consigned material. In other words, the material that our customers send us, as opposed to what we we buy ourselves and it to populate a circuit board and maybe a customer will send us material to populate onto a circuit board. And it's just an awful process, right? It's like our perspective. Was what you heard in last week's episode where, Rob's explaining how challenging, how difficult, how painful it can be getting all that, right. When customers can sign material. And then we heard from customers saying on their side, it's a painful experience because they'll consign material, they'll send it in part number ABC, and then they'll say, Hey, use this on job one and hold on to the rest of the material. And then we, and we get another order from that same customer. And they say, Hey, look for part number ABC again, to put on job number two and somewhere, something will get lost in translation and our inventory won't show that part as being available, or maybe there was a one part number difference in like the more we realized the complications on both sides of the equation. Like that was a real eye-opener for me working with. Or excuse me, not working with, but listening to Rob and how challenging it is for him. And of course, I know how challenging it is. I hear from everybody who deals with it in our receiving department, kitting department, surface Mount department, through hole department, everybody deals with these challenges. But then also to hear it from the customer and it was like back to back, it was like, oh man, there's a huge opportunity here where we can just make this whole thing so much better than it is. And ideally so much better than how our competitors do it, which would be great. Is as much as possible. I know we like to talk about, Not that I know we like to talk about. I know we like to keep the show is agnostic as possible, but at the end of the day, I want to be the best we can possibly be. And I would love to find a way to make consigned material even better than, and an even better experience than anybody else in the world deals with it. So, more to catch up on that. That's my first half of 2020 goal is to tidy that up and get that to be super slick and smooth for everybody. We'll see. We'll see how successful Chris is. Come July. If it's still a total mess, you can play back this episode and tell me I was I set false expectations.
Melissa:I'll put a note in my calendar in July for us to
Chris:Yeah, well, that's good. Know that'll motivate me,
Melissa:yeah, especially, yeah, especially now it's become just so much more of a problem because of the parts. It didn't used to be as much, but
Chris:That's right. That's right. I would say before the component crisis. I mean, it had to have been 80, 90% of our builds, we had no consigned material. We were the buy everything. And now it feels like just the opposite where customers get anxious that they're not going to have their materials. So they buy it up as much as they can. And then when they place an order, they send us the few parts that they did buy. Cause they were worried that they would go out of stock, we'll buy most everything else, but then they'll send us these four or five parts that they bought because they're critical to their design and they, yeah, they're not going to buy a 10 K resistor, please don't send us 10k resistors, please don't send send us 10k resistors, but they're going to buy maybe the STM 32 module, or something like that. And some critical voltage regulator who knows. And yeah, that's happening more and more. And actually I think that's fits right into this week's episode about planning planning your builds ahead of time when she say.
Melissa:I would definitely say. So, if you're listening to this episode, when it comes out, then it might be a little bit too late to plan ahead for what we're going to be talking about. But it should be mostly an evergreen episode that you can use for future years. If so, listen to this again, And, the end of 2022, and hopefully it'll help you out.
Chris:And what is this evergreen topic we're going to be discussing?
Melissa:This is Chinese new year. Something that if you have been in this industry for a while, you have most likely dealt with so maybe you'll be able to feel some of our pain on this one, if you're maybe just getting started in the electronics industry then it's and you haven't experienced the Chinese new year before then this will help you prepare.
Chris:You are in for a, quite a rollercoaster ride and I'm not even sure if most of us are tall enough to get on it.
Melissa:I don't think so. So, should we start out with some fun stuff or some of the little harder to swallow stuff?
Chris:Let's start it out for some fun stuff. We'll eat well, ease our way into it. First of all I know we call it Chinese new year are our suppliers in China. And even in Taiwan, they often just refer to it as Chinese new year. Not entirely sure why, but I know that a lot of people refer to it as spring festival it's I don't think here's again. My great ignorance. I don't think it's strictly related to China. I think there's a number of nations in that area that celebrate the spring festival. Am I wrong?
Melissa:Yeah, so there are several, yeah. China, Taiwan. I think Korea, I see, I should have done better research. But Yeah, so as far as I'm aware, of course, anyone listening, correct us if we're wrong. The spring festival is the entire holiday that like new here is a specific date And it can also be referred to as lunar new year. I guess the problem with that is that there's other cultures that also have a lunar new year, which is not on the same date as the Chinese new year. So, but I think it tends to be as long as you're. As long as you're being respectful using it in the correct connotation, then people won't be offended, whether you call it Chinese new year or lunar new year, spring festival.
Chris:And I guess it must be lunar new year because it follows a lunar pattern rather than a solar panel.
Melissa:Yeah. So it's the, it's celebrated on the second new moon following the winter solstice. But I think some other cultures have a lunar new year celebration on the first new moon after the winter solstice. So
Chris:And the winter solstice it's always like right around Christmas. Isn't it? Isn't it just before Christmas or I
Melissa:Yeah, it was before, well this year, well, the last year it was December 21st. I know. Cause that's when I had a surgery on that day, so
Chris:Well, there you go. That's an easy it. Days are only getting longer now after Melissa surgery.
Melissa:very positive.
Chris:And you survived. So we're all excited. Very good.
Melissa:I'm excited too.
Chris:Now my personal favorite fact that I learned we're gonna, we're going to share an interesting article we found, but my favorite fact from this article was fact number 12, that you get to eat dumplings for every meal of the day. That is awesome. I wonder if they have like, wow. I don't know if I've ever had a sweet dumpling, but why couldn't you? Right. You could just, you could pack it with some like delicious fruit stuff and put some powdered sugar on that thing. Oh, man. I got to find me some of that now.
Melissa:Chris's dumpling shop
Chris:Yup.
Melissa:coming in 2022.
Chris:That would be the first sponsor of the pick place podcast.
Melissa:Wow.
Chris:Yeah, so very good now 20, 22 year of the tiger. Interesting. Oh, and also like, apparently. It's not a good thing for it to be your animal. Right?
Melissa:yeah. It's bad. you're supposed to havehave bad luck the year of yeah. Your animal. And one thing I believe people do to try to counteract that is that they always have little icon of no, they don't know they have. So for example, I know they sell little like key chains or little things that you know, the little charm trinkets you like attached to your phone or something. and you're supposed to have that on you. And that's supposed to kind of mitigate like the bad luck that comes along with it.
Chris:Interesting. Interesting. It's funny. I was listening to that reminds me, I was listening to a podcast of a formula one podcast and they were interviewing the team principal sort of like the head coach of the red bull racing. And they said, you're a very superstitious person, aren't you? And he goes, no, I'm not superstitious. He goes, but you know, I do certain things the same way each time, because it sets me in the right. Like it feels right. Sets me in the right mood. It sets me, it just, things come together and click a little bit better. So for example, you said, come race day. I always make sure that, I put my left shoe on, in front of my right shoe or something, I don't know what it was or something similar. a lot of, baseball players are famous for this football players are famous for this. They have a certain way that they get dressed or put their gloves on or do something like that. And they call it superstition. And I loved how he put it. He goes, it's not a superstition. It just feels right. It's like, if I do it and I nail it, then I'm just like, yeah, I'm ready to go. I'm ready for this race. I'm ready. I was like, oh, that's a really interesting way of putting it as opposed to like the superstition of the bad tiger. Maybe people put these little charms on because it makes them feel good. And then, Hey, they feel good. They have a positive attitude, then good things are going to come to them because they got this positive attitude.
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:I like it. like it. I'm all about it. Let's have a positive attitude towards manufacturing around Chinese new year. What do you think?
Melissa:you need one. You need one second.
Chris:Yeah, Yeah, I would say so. That's for sure. So, all right. So why do we need one? What's going on.
Melissa:You might think that, okay, it's only a week out of the whole year. Just plan for that. But unfortunately it doesn't quite work that way. So for one, a lot of suppliers overseas, they'll start slowing down their production or stopping production a week or two before the holiday. A lot of employees will cause it, since it's the longest holiday, people will travel very far to return home for their holiday. A lot of employees will leave before. So even if the manufacturer's open, they may have some reduced capacity. So less things get out of the door.
Chris:Yeah. So you're saying like, okay, the fabrication line, doesn't shut down until day X, but day X minus five. I'm already a half staff basically.
Melissa:Yeah. So they might say, oh yeah, like we're still accepting new orders, but the likelihood that order will actually ship before has gone down. Yeah. And then not only that is that there's just the whole after-effects of afterwards. We typically, I think I would say, see a knock on effect for about one to two months after the holiday officially ends, that it takes for us to get back to normal. That again is just, suppliers are dealing with a backlog of orders that came in before the holiday. And something really interesting is that there's a really large employee turnover during this time.
Chris:I heard about this. Yeah. I've heard about this. That this is yeah, I was making two bucks an hour, but you know, I'm tired of making two bucks an hour. I want to find a place where I can make two 50 or three bucks an hour, for example.
Melissa:yeah. I was doing some research into this and actually found a little podcasts clip from marketplace where they were talking about this. I'll link it in the show notes. The two months after Chinese new year is known as job hunting season and one of the reasons for this is that employees will usually receive their annual bonuses before Chinese new year. So they'll wait to get that, then they'll decide to change their job after the holiday. And sometimes a place will just, Yeah. And sometimes employers will just quit and won't come back.
Chris:Yeah. Just don't even say that they're not coming back. They just literally don't come back. Yeah.
Melissa:interesting.
Chris:I read I've read a number of books about the supply chain in China and kind of the traditional. It's obviously generalities can never be applied to specifics, but in generally speaking, there is this situation of people moving around quite a bit within even the same sort of industry. So for example if you live in Shenzen and you're working for a PCB fabricator, well, there's probably like a hundred other PCB fabs in Shenzen. So you could just not come back because you go find another PCB fab. That's going to give you an extra 25 cents an hour, and you just don't bother telling anybody because you don't really need to, you already got your new job. What's the big deal. Yeah.
Melissa:Yeah. I've also. Seen some things about people saying this is actually a time where you really want to pay a lot of attention to quality assurance on your products. They tend to have a larger number of new employees that, maybe might not be used to the same standards since they're still being trained.
Chris:Oh, so you're saying post Chinese new
Melissa:Yeah. Post Chinese new year. I don't know if we really experienced that in our factory. Would you say that we have Chris
Chris:no, I, we, as far as how it impacts us, because we buy nearly all of our parts from the U S supply chain, except for the PCBs. It's really kind of easy to keep an eye on this because the parts supply is relatively unchanged. Well, everything's changed. Not that chip crisis is here, but as far as the PCBs are concerned it's oftentimes more like, we'll see it before it actually becomes a product. So what I mean by that is we'll get engineering files. Maybe that will have mistakes that we're surprised by. And we're like no, this isn't no you've you didn't do this. Right. Or something like that. And so we can kind of catch it before it actually arrives in the building. A lot of the times, and the truth is like our suppliers are ISO 9,001 and they've got all these, they're trying to meet a certain quality. So they have a process that they follow and you don't necessarily always have the same specific people in labor following that process. But you will almost always have the same supervisors and management team that are making sure that the process is still being followed. And so we've largely been unaffected by that phenomenon. We have definitely been affected by. The knock-on effect, post Chinese new year things taking a while to ramp back up. We usually do like, the stuff started shipping pretty much right after like our suppliers will say, yeah, we're shut down from, well, this year it's going to be January 31st to February six. And I'll tell you on February 7th we're going to hear from them. Like they're back to work February 7th. There's no joking around, but that's because we're also dealing with the management team. We're not dealing with individual laborers within that company. And so like by the seventh we hear from them and they'll tell us like up job such and such as shipping, these are shipping, this is going to be taken extra three days is going to take an extra two days. Like, like it, it does start, they ramp up pretty quickly. But again, that's our suppliers, right? I can't say that every supplier is going to ramp up quite as well or handle that quite as well as they are. They may have some special sauce that helps them get through that.
Melissa:Yeah. I mean, that's definitely one of the benefits of having a good relationship with your PCB supplier and having good communication with them is that you're able to even have those sort of conversations because that in a lot of places, that's not necessarily the case.
Chris:Nope. Nope. It helps. It helps to be a fairly big fish in that pond as well. I think we're one of the largest customers, so they tend to treat us very well,
Melissa:True. True. True. So, even if things are shipping exactly on time after the holiday another thing that we often have to deal with is just transit delays. So even if it was supposed to ship on February 7th and it does ship on February 7th I know right now I believe DHL has specifically from like China to the USA of three to six days, service adjustment, meaning it's going to take three to six days longer than it already would take in order to get here.
Chris:Most of it's airfreighted so we don't have to deal with the port issues that everybody else is
Melissa:oh no. Then it would be. Much longer than three to six days.
Chris:But PCBs are small, pretty lightweight pretty high value for their size, so we can air freight it and it's pretty simple to arrive. But even with that, like you get these delays simply because you just. Well, just picture like, like, a sign wave, so to speak, your sign wave just before Chinese new years is going through the roof. Right. It's going up up, and then during Chinese new year, it just collapses. And then right after Chinese new year, it just goes up up, and you can't sustain that level of demand. It's just it's impossible to go from a thousand miles an hour to reverse, and then back up to a thousand miles an hour, it, cars want to go a nice sustained 60 miles an hour. And that's kind of, so that you could talk about that from a shipping perspective, but also the factories themselves, right. They just, you can't, you just cannot ramp up to that speed. I remember when I was working for a. Panasonic, the sales team would always complain around a certain time of year because the lead times would go crazy. It was just like impossible to get machines and, back then, it would go to like a 16 week lead time, which is normal right now. But back then, it was insane because we're used to like a four week lead time for machines. And we, we'd sit in these meetings. Like I can't sell against universal instruments because universal instruments makes it right here in the United States and their lead times, blah, blah, blah. It was largely a matter of look, a factory can only produce so many machines a year and they get a cycle of demand. Right. And so right before the Christmas season say like July, August, They have to deliver a lot of machines to customers because everybody's ramping up for the for the holidays. And so all of a sudden demand is through the roof. Well, Panasonic, can't just all of a sudden, triple their capacity to meet the demand of how they produce machines. You just, you're only gonna produce as many as you can produce. And then you have lead times, and maybe you can build a little bit of a buffer, but this is the same thing with all the Chinese new year. There's only so much that they can produce right before Chinese new year from the increased demand. And then there's only so much that they can produce after Chinese new year, trying to catch up with the backlog. And that's why you see the one to two month knock on effect of the holiday. Yeah.
Melissa:Yeah. Well, in terms of CircuitHub we try to pay really close attention to, The number of orders that we're getting and making sure that we'll be able to deliver them on time, which is why you're likely to see much longer lead times during that time is because we don't want to promise you something that is like, say we're going to be able to ship it in seven days and then it ends up being a month and you're very upset.
Chris:Yeah.
Melissa:So, yeah.
Chris:The truth is that's as sad to say is happening more and more often, simply from the supply chain perspective, because we may get data from a supplier, a parts warehouse that says, yeah, we have 400 of these in stock and then you go to buy them and they're like, surprise. We don't actually have them. Yeah. That's painful. But that's a parts issue. They're not necessarily related to the Chinese new year supply and demand issue.
Melissa:Yeah, fun stuff
Chris:If it weren't any fun, we wouldn't be doing this would be, it'd be too easy.
Melissa:live for the drama.
Chris:That's it live for the drama. That's those are the words I live by Melissa. I'm all about the drama. All about the drama.
Melissa:I know you are. I know you are.
Chris:Yes.
Melissa:So a few things about 2022 specifically, if you're listening to this podcast right when it comes out. So this year, the lunar new year is on February 1st and the public holiday is from January 31st to February six. And it's going to be especially disruptive this year due to a couple of things. One is that we never really buy parts from China. We try to only source from domestic authorized distributors, but because of the ship shortages, we've just been having to find parts anywhere we can get them. Right?
Chris:With, with customer approval
Melissa:Oh yes. Yes, of course. Yeah. And again, because . Of that people tend to be panicked buying to deal with Chinese new year more than they normally do.
Chris:If a listener is not familiar with what Melissa means by an authorized distributor I'm trying to look this up real time, but we had an episode let's see, episode, July 13th and July 27th, 2020, going way back. About, yeah. About the parts purchasing process. Whoa, that's a, literative the pick place podcast about the parts person purchasing process? Part one and part two part one, and part two as a whole lot of alliteration we talk about what it means to be an authorized distributor and how a distributor becomes authorized and what that means about the parts and yada, yada definitely good ones to go back and listen to. And why the current chip shortage is driving us to go to China for parts and what sort of risks you take on from doing that sort of thing? Yeah, it's all quite interesting.
Melissa:What else? Oh, yes. COVID is still here. And if
Chris:Oh, that thing.
Melissa:yeah. Did you know that's still a problem?
Chris:Yes. Yes. Well, as a matter of fact it's still a problem even for Worthington and for CircuitHub, we've had a number of employees, direct employees can contract COVID test positive. They've all recovered. Well, I haven't heard of anybody. I've heard of a couple of people feeling pretty awful on it, like really awful. And I know that I don't know all the specifics, but I know of the people I've spoken with personally, who've had COVID have gotten through it relatively well with just kind of. Headache aches and pains may be a little bit of coughing. But each of these people were fully vaccinated and many of them even had their booster shot. So good news is I believe every single one of our employees, like I there's a chance I could be wrong. I don't want to pry into people's personal lives, but every person I've talked to in our company has told me that they've been vaccinated, which is great to hear. And we've really not missed a beat. Thanks to people staying healthy and people protecting themselves and isolating themselves when they have gotten sick. Or tested positive from COVID and everybody's done a great job and people stepping up and helping out each other. But it's a, it's still a thing COVID is still having an impact on absolutely every aspect of manufacturing and the supply chain. And even just like getting drivers for ups, you know what I mean? It's just every everything.
Melissa:Yeah, It's definitely temporarily decreasing the workforce. Which is a good thing for people to stay at home when they're sick. Of course. Yeah, And I know China is still implementing kind of a zero COVID policy, so they're really trying to keep the cases down to
Chris:What do you think they mean by like zero policy? Like I said, I don't understand.
Melissa:So their goal is to have no COVID cases.
Chris:Oh, okay. All Well that's ambitious.
Melissa:Yes. Very ambitious, especially right. now. But that just means that, for example, if people left home for the holidays and then con contracted it, maybe they're not going to be able to return to work for a little bit longer. So it might be a little bit longer before the manufacturer's workforces, like get back to 100%. And so we might see that kind of knock on effect as well, which yeah.
Chris:everything. Holy cow. I didn't, I didn't even cross my mind that would be much of an issue. And then they're quite strict about so you were saying as a nation, they're quite strict about how they handle these sorts of things. So if you do contract it, you that's it for you, you are locked down, I guess.
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:Yeah.
Melissa:until you're healthy. Yeah.
Chris:Well, we have some confusion. We had some confusion about how to handle. People who did test positive for the virus. Basically we just go like, I am not a health expert and nor do I ever want to claim to be, so we have no choice, but to just follow health experts advice and so we just kind of go by what the CDC is recommending and we just, well, I know it's kinda, oh, there's so many of them, but I feel terrible for them because like, like, Knowledge changes and thus your decision-making must change with knowledge. Like I get it. I mean, perhaps there's something political going on there. I don't think that there is, it's not typically a political entity. There is, are there are political appointees within the CDC, of course, but I think largely it's managed and operated by career individuals and team members in that, in, in the organization. Right. It's not just, it's not like, it's not like, when Donald Trump was the president and then Joe Biden became the president, that all of a sudden, there's an entirely new staff at the CDC. That's not how it works, right? Yeah, there are political appointees at the CDC because it's important that the government keep a close eye on the health of its people. Of course, you're going to have political appointees, but. There are scientists. There's researchers, there's people who have spent their career and are starting out their career within this organization, trying to make the best decisions they can. And it's just like us, like, one day I'm going to say oh yeah, don't use any Panasonic 10 K resistors because, we had a bad batch of them and now we don't want to use them. And then, then I learned later on Panasonic said, oh, we had a bad batch. This is the isolated lot number. Okay. Don't use that lot number. Now we can use Panasonic 10 K resistors. Right? You change your decision based on experience and knowledge. And so the CDC is having to change their decision based on experience and knowledge, and that's changing constantly. They're dealing with a virus that nobody has ever had to deal with before. So they're constantly trying to
Melissa:virus is changing constantly, too.
Chris:Right? Right. So, so right now, what we, I believe the current recommendation, as of what are we here, January 7th 20, 22 is if you ha, if you do not have symptoms like you test positive and you do not have symptoms you can probably return to normal society and come back to work after five days of isolation. But if you do have symptoms you should probably go as many as 10 days of isolation. And the understanding is like the most opportune time for, and this is all about spreading the disease. They just don't want you to spread the disease to other people. That's what it's all about. The most opportune time for the disease to spread is the latest information I just heard this morning is a couple of days before you have symptoms. And a few days after you have symptoms and so that's why they want the 10 days for if you have symptoms in the five days, if you don't, which I think is fairly reasonable, you got to find a line between not shutting your whole life down and protecting your coworkers and your loved ones. Right? So it's tricky. It's definitely is tricky, but at least we have some freedom. I hope that the Chinese government has a similar sort of policy and they don't just lock people down for 90 days. I have no idea, but if they want to get to zero COVID cases, it's probably more aggressive than the, what the CDC in the United States is recommending.
Melissa:Well, they have, well, it's very different over there than it is
Chris:Yes. Yes. For sure. A whole other topic of that neither of us are qualified to
Melissa:No, not at all.
Chris:Not in the least, not in the least. Yeah, for sure.
Melissa:Anything else? 2022 specific, you can think of.
Chris:2022 specific yeah, no, I w I would just say in general start planning ahead last week before you listened to this episode.
Melissa:yeah.
Chris:no, I wouldn't say anything is, as it relates to the specific year, nothing particular comes to mind, but want to talk about some generalities of what you can do regardless of if it's becomes 20, 23, 20, 24, God help us. We get to 20, 25.
Melissa:oh, gosh. Here are some things you can do to hopefully make Chinese new year season suck less for you personally.
Chris:It's just to be clear, it's still going to suck. It's just going to suck less.
Melissa:Unless you are celebrating Chinese new year, then you're probably having a wonderful time and I'm very happy for you.
Chris:Which I will say I went to in 2019, I was at Disney land in California. Just before like a couple of days before the official Chinese new year celebration. And so it was all very much themed around the typical stereotypical, like colors and dances and foods and everything related to Chinese. The greatest time I've ever had at Disney in my life. Oh, it was awesome. It was, everything was so beautiful. Like they had all these special foods related to it and it was just fantastic. I would love to go to China for Chinese new year sometime, and then just see all the, just the beautiful, I mean, they make some gorgeous stuff. You just look up Chinese, new year celebrations on the internet and you can just see how beautiful everything is.
Melissa:Yeah. So, first of all, this may seem obvious, but ask your suppliers when they will be closed. Cause they might close sooner than you think that they might be closed. And also the last day that they'll be accepting new orders that will ship before they close for Chinese new year and then aim to place your order before whatever that date is.
Chris:And I will say even if you have a domestic supply, Ask them, what sort of impact Chinese new year is going to have on their supply chain? Because let's say you're ordering injection, molded plastic from a domestic supplier. Well, maybe they source their plastic from China. They probably don't actually, most of the plastic comes from the United States, but regardless they might. So it could have an impact on
Melissa:Yeah, well, that's another point is that we've definitely noticed that during Chinese new year, even our domestic suppliers that we use, they experience a huge influx of orders because people have to turn somewhere else in order to get their urgent orders. So even if, usually we might be able to get something super quick from them. they might just already have a whole ton of orders out they're working through. Which means that lead times will be longer. Prices could even be higher than normal. Yeah.
Chris:Chinese new year is a great time. Like, as far as the supply chain, disruption and everything, it's a great time to just sort of like tidy things up. You know what I mean? Like this is if you're an engineer this is the time where you just, you Polish off the rest of your designs. You try to get your database sorted, do all these other related tasks that don't involve manufacturing. If you can queue those up for Chinese new year and get all of your manufacturing related things off your decks in December your budget, you're much better off
Melissa:Yes. You'll be a lot less stressed.
Chris:for sure. We actually have a we have a number of customers and we see, we do see like a an uptick in early December where customers just start placing orders. Cause they know they're like, Hey, I just got to build up reserves to get me through February and March. I just have to do
Melissa:Yeah. Stock up on inventory. If you know that you're going to need it. Definitely do that. Don't wait till the last minute to place your orders.
Chris:You're going to pay a lot of money to do it.
Melissa:pay a lot of money and there's a chance that they might end up shipping later than they're supposed to. Just because of everything we just talked about for this year, I know we're recommending customers place time-sensitive orders by the week of January 10th at the latest.
Chris:Which is literally the day that you're going to listen to this. If you listen to it the day it comes out. So
Melissa:sorry.
Chris:order it today.
Melissa:Right now, stop listening, press pause
Chris:Yes, for sure.
Melissa:All right. And now that you've ordered your circuit boards pause again and email, or send us a chat to let us know that they're very time sensitive. Actually, you should have already done that before you placed the order.
Chris:Yes.
Melissa:Because then there, if you let us, if you let us know your expectations, then we, if there's a problem we can let you know. So then maybe you'll have to change plans.
Chris:Yeah. Or we'll have to, I mean, it sounds terrible, but we'll have to charge you more because maybe we have to get parts or boards from somebody that we weren't anticipating having to get parts of boards from. And that cost is going to go up.
Melissa:And lastly just yeah. Breathe and try to go with the flow.
Chris:Be chill. Yup. Well, this is why we produce this kind of, kind of, content, right? It's because we do feel bad and we want. Warn people and give people a heads up and get them prepared. And like, we have articles on our website about Chinese new year. And what sort of an impact it's going to have on things like this is the first time we've done an audio version of it, but we've each year we always publish something about Chinese new year to try to help people get prepared. Yeah. it's it's a wonderful time for people that, that work insanely hard to get a bit of a break.
Melissa:Oh Yeah. no, it's definitely a wonderful thing. I have not doubting that at all. It just if you're in manufacturing, I'm sure you can relate to at least one of the things we've said,
Chris:Yeah. Yep. They're difficult waters to navigate. And and the truth is if you plan well it will be a lot less painful. There's there, there's the old saying about proper planning, prevents piss, poor performance, and and that's all part of it, right? Like, if you need assemblies on February 1st well, and, order them to get them to ship to you by January 15th, because, because of something I'm not regardless of Chinese new year, but if you are going to need something on such a date, make sure you have them weeks at a time. Otherwise you're you're in a world of hurt. Just-in-time manufacturing is obviously important. You don't want to, you don't want to make major investments in thousands of boards that you won't sell for a year. Obviously that's understandable, but at least give yourself a couple of weeks buffer. I think that's just smart. And that's just wise advice regardless of the time of year is to, give yourself a buffer and make sure you're prepared for these things. Especially with the, with this parts of plate supply chain. Like honestly, Melissa I almost wonder how disruptive Chinese new year is going to be this year, considering how disruptive the supply chain already is. Like, are we even gonna feel it? It might just be a
Melissa:that's true. Yeah,
Chris:I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. But I hope if anybody is an English speaking person in Asia and they're listening to this, I hope they have a wonderful time with their family and friends and enjoy. All right. It's time for my favorite bar. excited pet peeve of the week
Melissa:Yup. Yup.
Chris:A good one this week.
Melissa:Yeah, I do. So over the holidays, I had a minor surgery, done nothing serious. But because of that, I spent a lot of time on the couch watching different movies on my television. And it reminded me of one of my pet peeves, which is the dynamic range in movies and how they're oftentimes not made for at home viewing. And yeah. So what I mean by that, and you've Probably. experienced it before, so you're yeah. You're like, you're watching a movie and you're like, I can't hear what they're saying. It's very quiet. So you turn up the volume
Chris:Oh,
Melissa:and then you're watching like an action movie. I watched a lot of a lotof Marvel movies. Yeah. And then there's like an explosion and now you're deaf.
Chris:Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. So that's dynamic range. That's what they call that.
Melissa:Yeah. I believe
Chris:Now I know that I know that apple TV has a feature where it will try to equalize the volumes.
Melissa:Yeah. But You have to, turn that on, right?
Chris:Yeah. You have to turn it on. I don't know if it's like you turn it on for everything or each movie you watch. I'm not sure how it works,
Melissa:Yeah. Cause I know the, like the sound compression stuff they use for the movie, like the movie theater is different for your TV. So you know if you have a very fancy sound system in your home that is equivalent to what they have in movie theater, then it won't be an issue. I do not.
Chris:My old house, I did have a very fancy sound system. I really did. I installed speakers in the walls. They were flat, flat red. Oh, it was awesome. Right up against the dry wall behind the couch, beside the TV at the center channel, I had a mixer and or a not a mixer, a an amplifier that, did the 5.1 Dolby and with a subwoofer. And honestly, it was awesome to watch movies on that, but I knew how so I do not have that yet, maybe someday, but right now we're using the TV speakers, which is pretty, it's very convenient, but terrible
Melissa:Yeah. And I know I know like, yeah, like you said, apple TV, I think has I think maybe Netflix has a setting where you can choose which audio. to play. But yeah, it's just very confusing that for every single app you're using, you Have to figure out which one it is. And I don't know. I just want to be able to hear what people are saying without waking up my neighbors at 11 at night.
Chris:Have you gotten to the point now where you turn on closed captioning. So you know what people
Melissa:Oh, yeah, no I've had closed. Captionings turned on for a lot. I love closed. Captionings
Chris:Ah, that's great.
Melissa:it's gotten to the point where I actually dislike watching things without it, Yeah.
Chris:What's funny is I my wife likes closed captioning quite a bit as well. And pretty much, if she's watching something, usually she'll have it turned on. But I find it really district., I have a tough time getting into the story and paying attention to what's happening and like the subtle looks and details. And like, I, I miss the storytelling when I have the closed captioning on, I don't mind it, obviously, if she wants it on, I'll leave it on. But I like, I generally speaking I prefer not to have it. I prefer to be able to hear the people speak. And now I say that as a fan of one of the most egregious directors, when it comes to dynamic range in all movies, Christopher Nolan, I like any Christopher Nolan movie. Like I think he deliberately. Makes it difficult to understand what people are saying. I do. I truly do. I truly do because he gives everybody crazy voices. Just look at Bain's character in the Batman movie, right? Like he was, so he had an accent and then he had that crazy voice changer and you could hardly understand him. And I think Christopher Nolan used that as a means of making him even scarier because you couldn't hear what he was saying and you didn't know if he was being threatening or what, and he was a terrifying character in those movies, but he's the worst. And he's been the worst. Ever since I, the first movie I ever watched a, his, which was the prestige, if you've ever seen the prestige, I remember not being able to understand David Bowie's character Nikolai Tesla. I could not understand what he was saying the entire I'm like, why can't I understand this guy? And then the more Christopher Nolan movies came out and every character you couldn't understand, I'm like, oh, that's just this director. That's just what he does.
Melissa:Yeah. Yeah. I have heard people suggest that. Yeah. Directors do that so that your, to force you to try to pay more attention.
Chris:I could hear that or I could see that. I could see that. Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. But no we, we gotta fix the dynamic range. We gotta, what would be great is if, when they released these for home viewing, they had a. A means of like detecting your audio. Like, I feel like if like software is a thing, right, TVs are supposed to be quote unquote smart. Why don't they acknowledge the fact that you're watching something with TV speakers and then adjust accordingly. It's like, oh, they're TV
Melissa:automated thing. Yeah.
Chris:Right? So like when they release this, when Netflix compiles the various formats of the movie for streaming, they should have one with an audio track that's designed for TV speakers and one that's designed for somebody with a soundbar and one that's designed for somebody with a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound. And one for somebody who's listening to it with headphones, like, and then you should be able to detect what speaker system you're using and then provide the appropriate, mix audio mix.
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:And instead, they're just like, oh, it's smart. Which means that we put wifi on it so we can spy on you. It's like, right. That's what they mean by smart. Right. Let's be honest. Yeah. So we can sell you ads. That's what smart means now. Yeah. Or not sell you ads so we can sell ads. Yeah. It targeting you. Yeah. All right. Well, great. This has been a, this has been a fun one. I've enjoyed it. Bit of a bummer, bit of a bummer topic,
Melissa:Yeah. It's a bit of a bummer talking.
Chris:A necessary one that hopefully people learn from and take to heart. And especially if they're kind of new to the industry or new to the supply chain can appreciate how disruptive all that can be. Obviously there's gonna be, there's gonna be people that this has zero impact on. I'm sure that if you work at apple, you prepared for Chinese new year of 20, 22 back in 2017.
Melissa:yeah.
Chris:That's just the timelines that apple and big companies work on. But if you're working at a small company and you're, team of five people or even 30 people this is probably something that's gonna have a major impact on you. So hopefully you found this helpful and if you did, or if you didn't feel free to email us and provide some feedback where contact at pick place, podcast.com as always, we love it when you tweeted us. We have Melissa and co at circuit hub and myself and my team at w assembly, w assembly.
Melissa:Thanks for listening to the pig place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Chris:Thanks everybody.
Melissa:we'll be back with hopefully a slightly more uplifting episode.
Chris:Yeah, we'll get nerdy again. Folks. We'll get nerdy again less downer. That's a wrap.