Strive to diversify your supply chain

When Apple was in the shit (yes there was a such a time) and were losing customers (and only loyalists remained), Adobe shifted it's energy on the Windows platform. Suddenly Apple users were seeing their Windows colleagues getting all the cool Adobe stuff months (sometimes years) before them.

I can't find the actual reference, but Steve Jobs said something about never again being dependent on a 3rd party provider for critical services/products -- i.e. limit your supply risk. And Final Cut, Aperture, iWork etc. came out -- the logic being that if Microsoft/Adobe had to stop building software for the Mac, it would be OK because the Apple alternatives were really great.

I had a similar experience recently (and am still navigating the challenge). When we first started building our Earth Cycler composting machines we wrote our own software to run the machines on the Omron PLC platform.

This worked pretty well until my partner/supplier/friend decided to move to the USA to work on automation projects for Ford (shame, man!).

So we pushed responsibility for the full product to our fabricator. They'd do it all: automation, mechanisation, supply of all parts and components. And I didn't really care if they used Omron or, as they distribute this product range, Sigmatek (and Austrian PLC platform).

But then things took time. There were hassles porting the Omron process to Sigmatek. There were issues with load cells.

And it took longer. And the software is not 100%.

And now we have Delta (the variant not a automation platform), so things are taking even longer. But we're stuck.

Because we have one supplier.

And that's not good.