|
Following the growing trend among distributors to develop online ‘communities’ of engineers, the Avnet Company, Silica, has launched a designers’ community to provide open access to local in-house engineering expertise. The Silica Designers’ Community is integrated into the company’s new web site, and provides a portal to forums, video content and technical resources supported by the distributors own front-line engineers.
According to Miguel Fernandez, Silica President, “The new site not only meets the needs of our rapidly growing customer base and engineering community, but will also grow with the company in the future. Our web technology has caught up with what customers and suppliers expect from a distributor’s online service offering: alerting-type capabilities for quick and easy access to new products and solutions, technical support, and a place where engineers can directly interact with our application specialists or other community members.” The Designers’ Community can be accessed at www.community.silica.com or via www.silica.com.
Members of the community are being encouraged to post questions on the range of Silica areas of technology expertise such as programmable logic, microcontrollers and processors, analogue/power, RFID, lighting and metering. Community management is supported by local champions from across Europe.
Members of Silica’s Designers’ Community can expect both timely and relevant responses to their various forum posts. The answers provided will be supplemented by responses from Silica’s field application engineers, with community managers ensuring that all queries are addressed rapidly. The Silica FAE team includes over a hundred field applications engineers across Europe with a huge variety of skills and specialist knowledge, representing a level of design community resource hitherto unavailable from silicon distributors.
Kerstin Kurth, Director Communications at Silica, commented, "This is just the first stage of the company's website re-launch, which will be completed in stages over the next twelve months. The new site offers a clean, contemporary look and feel, and reflects more than a year of customer-focused usability research and design. Forthcoming phases incorporate a variety of supporting features and networking tools, but all will have the customer at the heart of the changes.”
Furthermore, there will be incentives for designers to engage with the community, for example by contributing their own resources and uploading videos to complement Silica-developed materials including how-to demonstrations, interviews and tutorials.
