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Wendy Spratt started her three decades-long career at Intel as a research and development engineer, very focused on coming up with new technology solutions for the company’s product lines. Today, she is senior director of global supply chain, but in the beginning, she didn’t think much about how supply chains worked and the impact her role had on them.
“It just wasn’t something that came up in your day-to-day activities,” she says. “For example, if I’m an engineer trying to solve a problem and I need a raw material, I want it right now; [I’m] not thinking about expedite costs or whether we’re going down a path to make it difficult from a supply availability standpoint. I didn’t think of any of that. I thought, ‘Here is a cool engineering problem to go solve, here’s what we need to do, and here’s the new equipment or raw materials we need to support that.’”
When Spratt decided to give supply chain roles a try, she opened her eyes to different sides of the business and ways unintentional decisions worked for or against cost-saving and efficiency efforts. Those experiences helped her form a supply chain-centered approach to how the company designs products and solutions that has helped cut costs, improve time to market, and transform the company’s product life cycle management process.
Beyond helping the company develop a resilient supply chain, her insights have helped to foster more collaboration between the supply chain and Intel’s engineers.
“Very often, in order to get things to work across the company, you got to understand how what you’re doing in one space impacts another.”
Wendy Spratt
“A lot of people get really into their world and get siloed in their thought process and very often, in order to get things to work across the company, you got to understand how what you’re doing in one space impacts another,” Spratt says.
While that wisdom is rooted in decades of technology development, manufacturing, logistics operations, and supply chain experience, Spratt has always lived her life with the curiosity she’d need to be a thought leader in her industry. As a kid, she’d spend her days tinkering on things with her dad and uncle, asking millions of questions. “As early as I can remember, I was the annoying kid who asked why and how to everything,” she says.
Spratt brought that same level of inquisitiveness to her role at Intel. It’s what inspired her to look for more areas of growth after twelve years as an engineer. She had just come home from one of Intel’s international receiving locations and while the work she was doing was exciting, she was ready for a change. “I acknowledged that every technology was a learning experience, but it started gnawing at me that I just didn’t know much about the rest of the company,” she says.
She’d go on to develop an interest in supply chain, eventually serving as a manager to factories in Malaysia and Washington in addition to a development line in Oregon. As she looked at performance data, she realized that a lot of what the factories were building used raw materials that had long lead times and were single-sourced—factors that contributed to higher costs and slow on time delivery.
To figure out how to address those challenges, Spratt sat down with design engineers to understand why they made certain product development choices. Those conversations allowed her to show them the impact those choices made from a bird’s-eye view.
“Take on side projects, learn other areas of the supply chain equation, then learn to speak the same language of the individuals you’re trying to influence. You’ll be able to open doors that way and before you leave the conversation, they’ll be speaking your language.”
Wendy Spratt
“It was a really eye-opener,” she says. “They were going, ‘I had no idea.’ So as I brought the data to them, they were really interested in partnering to design better and with the supply chain in mind.” During the supplier selection process, risk and regulatory matters also came into deep consideration.
Those efforts helped stabilize on-time delivery metrics and lowered inventory costs by millions. That success continues to light a fire under Spratt today as she works to revamps product life cycle management for the company, helping to bring supply chain considerations earlier in the process. Since 2021, the company has been able to better identify supply chain risks and superior alternatives.
“We didn’t give ourselves a longer runway to risk mitigate but we gave ourselves a seat at the table to design out risk and that’s a more impactful voice to have in that conversation,” she says.
Leaders who want to make their company’s supply chain resilient and more sustainable should stay curious and ask a lot of questions, Spratt advises.
“Supply chain is the connector and in order to understand that you need to understand what you’re connecting,” she says. “Take on side projects, learn other areas of the supply chain equation, then learn to speak the same language of the individuals you’re trying to influence. You’ll be able to open doors that way and before you leave the conversation, they’ll be speaking your language.”
Avnet has served customers for an entire century as a global technology distributor and solutions provider. We support customers at each stage of a product’s lifecycle, from idea to design and from prototype to production. Our position at the center of the technology value chain enables us to accelerate product development so customers realize revenue faster.
As Intel’s senior director of global supply chain, Wendy Spratt recognizes the power of the Intel-Avnet partnership. The Avnet team also appreciates how the collaboration enables many innovations in technical engineering support, risk assessment strategy, and NPI and global production supply chains.
