Electronics manufacturers are under pressure to build smarter, smaller and more connected products. The intelligence layer gets most of the attention. Processors, sensors, connectivity and software define what the product can do.
But every build still depends on materials that are easier to overlook. Adhesives, tapes, encapsulants, gap fillers and thermal interface materials bond components, manage heat, protect critical parts and control vibration. These elements determine whether a design that performed in the lab can actually be manufactured at scale.
That’s what distributors for OEMs do. We look upstream from the supply chain at the decisions engineers make during the design phase and watch what those decisions cost when they reach production. The pattern is consistent enough to be named.
The supply chain risks hiding inside smart electronics are almost always material conversations that happen too late.
Smarter Electronics, More Complex Material Decisions
IoT connectivity, miniaturization and Industry 5.0 integration are pushing electronics into harsher environments—more heat, tighter tolerances, stricter compliance and faster production cycles. The materials holding these systems together need to evolve with them. They do not always.
Thermal management is one of the most consequential places where this gap shows up. As electronics shrink and process more power, heat dissipation becomes critical. Gap fillers, thermal interface materials and phase change films determine whether heat moves correctly or damages adjacent components. Specify the wrong material, and the product may not fail in the lab—it may degrade over time, or under conditions the lab never replicated.
“Thermal transfer is the name of the game. These electronics are getting smaller. They are processing more. The heat must go somewhere, or you fry the rest of the electronics,” Nick Longenbach, National Account Business Manager, R.S. Hughes.
Thermal management is one dimension of a broader challenge. Adhesives, encapsulants and specialty tapes must manage heat, resist chemicals, maintain bonds under vibration and meet compliance requirements—all under tighter tolerances than previous product generations required. Each variable needs to be evaluated not just for lab performance, but also for how the material behaves in a production environment, at volume, across every location where the product will be manufactured.
The Cost of a Late Materials Conversation
From the supply chain side, the pattern is consistent: a material gets selected because it solves the immediate engineering problem. But production scale reveals everything the lab did not.
An electronics manufacturer scrapping $350,000 worth of adhesive a year is a supply chain problem I’ve seen before. But it started as a specification decision—one made without accounting for how that material would behave at production volume. A $10,000 dispensing system would have eliminated the scrap. It was not in the spec. By the time the issue surfaced, the product was too far into its lifecycle to change without triggering a full FDA refiling and a rewrite of process documentation. The fix waits until the next device iteration, which is years away.
Cure time follows the same logic. Parts curing on trays for two days is not a materials failure—the bond is acceptable; the substrate holds. But a material chosen for bonding performance alone, without considering cure time and space constraints in a production environment, can quietly cap throughput.
Compliance adds another dimension that electronics manufacturers building across multiple locations cannot afford to overlook. A primer spec'd in without a geography check can become a line-down risk when that primer is not compliant in the state where production runs. In this situation, the material was technically appropriate, but the spec did not account for the full footprint.
The common thread here is material conversations that happened after critical decisions were already made—after the substrate was locked, the process written, and the supply chain built around a specification that still had unanswered variables.
What Belongs in the Design Phase
Engineers are skilled at solving immediate technical problems. They specify materials for the right performance reasons: bond strength, thermal conductivity and chemical resistance. Communicating with their process engineers is just as important. Less consistently addressed are the production and supply variables that determine whether a material that works in the lab can support a build at scale.
Those questions belong in the design phase. Where will this product be manufactured, and does the material perform consistently in that environment? One of the more persistent blind spots is that engineers test in a controlled lab in one climate, then move production to a facility with different humidity or temperature conditions. The adhesive behaves differently. Nobody can anticipate that if no one asks.
Other questions that should be asked earlier: What is the minimum order quantity relative to actual production volume? Is this product active, in dedicated production or approaching phaseout? If we scale in 18 months, could we consistently source this material? Does the supply chain behind it depend on a single geography?
A material specification that cannot be consistently sourced at production volume is not a viable specification. And when engineers work directly with a single manufacturer, they see only that manufacturer’s portfolio. Bring the same application to a distributor with access to multiple lines, and what looked like two or three options may become twelve. Engineers still make the final call, but they make it with more information.
What Getting it Right Looks Like
From the supply chain side, success has a clear signature: a product moves from prototype to production without a material-related disruption. The right materials are on the qualified products list. The supply chain behind each one is understood and forecasted. When production ramps, inventory scales with it.
That outcome is usually the result when material and supply chain conversations happen during the design phase—before the specification is locked, before the process is documented, before the production plan is built around assumptions no one has pressure-tested.
Engineers who navigate this well know which questions to ask and who to bring into the conversation, before the design goes too far. They ask about scalability, shelf life, MOQ and supply chain depth. They ask what happens to their build if a material becomes difficult to source.
Craig Schilling is Vice President of Supply Chain at R.S. Hughes, a specialty distributor of adhesives, tapes and advanced materials serving OEM manufacturers across North America.
