Weathering the economic storm

The last two years have been difficult for everyone. Corporate belt tightening, company closures, home mortgage foreclosures, and still other economic issues have garnered the headlines and been on everyone's mind. At the same time, developing new products and bringing them to market has never been more critical to ensure that your company has the best product for customers to purchase or to open new market opportunities.

Here at Maxim we see the same issues. We had to do our share of controlling costs, but we have done it very selectively so we don't impact your work. Thus, to the outside there has been very little visible change—our application staff is still readily accessible, samples of our products are just a phone call or web access away, and on-time delivery performance is better than ever.

One area inside Maxim that we barely touched during our belt-tightening was product research and development. We are maintaining our goal of releasing, on average, one new product every business day during 2009. Our forthcoming products will deliver even higher levels of circuit integration, lower power consumption, enhanced performance, and features that will help you design still greener and better performing systems that won't break the bank.

To ensure that you can get the help you need, when you need it, we also kept our applications engineering staff at close to full strength. We added new software that improves our internal communications. We want every technical question answered and no caller to be left without an answer. The reasoning is actually quite simple—it's our effort to make sure that you continue to develop your products on your schedule.

During the economic upheaval of the last 18 months we also revamped some of our manufacturing procedures so that all our products are available when you want them. Throughout our organization, we put a special focus on not becoming a bottleneck in your manufacturing flow. To do that, we added a fast-response capability—by keeping the right products in the manufacturing pipeline, we can deliver an uninterrupted flow to your production lines. On-time delivery performance is now over 95% and still improving.

As economic conditions improve, we will not stop our improvement process. We will continue to make additional investments to accelerate new product development. We will streamline our manufacturing to better deliver products that meet your needs and production deadlines.