A big cause of the problems is excess inventory, which has built up at all levels of the supply chain. Why? Overly optimistic demand forecasts by OEMs, and double and triple ordering at some companies to keep up with phantom demand. Many companies failed to see or ignored the signs of problems in their supply chain and forecasting systems.

The inventory crisis has led to the advent of supply chain management solutions that let companies and their trading partners share design and component info, reduce inventory costs, monitor their bills of materials and obtain increased visibility into their suppliers' inventories. It also gave birth to online trading exchanges in such models as extranet, private or third party.

More companies are starting to realize that they need to do a much better job in managing their supply chain, including design review.

By late last year, the high-tech industry was taking a closer look at what is now called supply chain collaboration, which means in a perfect world all trading partners can share information on critical components, design, inventory, order management and procurement in a secure electronic environment. Driving the need for such collaboration is a continued trend to outsource manufacturing and even design.

This year, several distributors as well as supply chain management solution providers made big efforts to develop collaboration tools that allow trading partners to share design, engineering, manufacturing and purchasing data. Most recently, RiverOne, formed by the merger of Need2Buy and Efinity, unveiled a suite of collaborative products that combine design, order and inventory management, planning and forecasting modules in a subscription-based, hosted environment. Another example is e2Open's tool set, which includes product and supply chain collaboration to help OEMs manage product life cycles and share designs and drawings.

Distributors aren't far behind. Arrow and Avnet now offer subscription-based supply chain management tools while Pioneer-Standard and Sager have tools focusing on helping engineers early in the design stage. But having the tools and knowing how to apply them are two different stories. Companies need to take the time, if they haven't already, to choose the right solutions and to learn how to use them.