A united voice rises out of the din
04/01/2003
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For the first time at a CleanRooms East conference, we decided to devote a single hour to an open forum that would include the full gamut of the cleanrooms community—vendors, distributors and end users.
Since the last five years have seen the business of cleanroom supply transformed, we thought it was time to build interaction between end users and exhibitors in an effort to learn how those changes—namely the internet, globalization and consolidation—have altered the businesses of each party and how we can work together to optimize those changes for the betterment of the community.
That was the "idealism" behind the session at the March show; but, quite frankly, since it was such a departure from our tutorial-style sessions, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.
What materialized that late Tuesday afternoon in the jam packed room wasn't a free-flowing conversation among vendors and distributors for the sake of end users, but a slowly evolving "group therapy" session of shared past and present experiences driven solely by our vendor and distributor community. Given the economic waters that this base has had to navigate the past two years, this was the obvious course.
There was a feeling of great unity building amongst the members of this group, a kinship spawned from a couple years of digging for new markets, exploring high-tech sales channels and coming face-to-face with bigger uncertainties than anyone has ever seen. When will the next consolidation news hit the front page? What is the lifespan of the regional distributor? How do I/should I do business in China?
All questions that burrow deeper than where the next boom of business will be found; all questions that illustrated to me that this was a long overdue event.
The comments on the forum that flowed forth that evening and the days that followed have been overwhelmingly positive. I'm hearing calls for a new, unified cleanrooms voice, a call to action, a call to lobby and a call to continue this forum, on a more formal level at regular intervals throughout the year.
Here was a simple hour set aside, no slides, no handouts, just a loosely designed set of questions to help engage its attendees. What we might have is the beginning of something that could help change the face of supply, product development as well as how the vendor community is perceived to its customers and, ultimately, the global consumer base.
Michael A. Levans
Chief Editor