Smith’s Continuous Investments in Our Technology

The market saw a significant shift in 2023 away from the tremendous shortages of the previous two years, and our customers’ needs shifted alongside it. Smith has spent the last 40 years adapting to everchanging market conditions, but by leveraging the newest technologies, we can build better, more resilient, and fully customizable solutions to connect our customers’ supply chains around the world.

Last year, we launched ELEVATE: Smith Technology Summit, where our IT team heard from employees across all regions, departments, and levels within the organization about their technology needs and goals. These thought-provoking discussions helped us to develop some key takeaways that set a clear direction for our technical team, and we have been working diligently since then to transform our business processes with technological improvements, automation, and optimization.

Recently, our team members gathered in Houston, Texas, for our second annual ELEVATE event to showcase the progress we’ve made since last year and to highlight exciting future advancements. During the two-day conference, experts from Trading, Operations, Accounting, IT, and more shared updates on more than 100 initiatives that are in progress or currently implemented.

New artificial-intelligence applications are being integrated into our daily lives at every turn, and Smith’s Research and Development team is at the forefront of this movement, developing new AI-based solutions for our technology platforms. We recently rolled out some exciting AI features for our Trading team, and we are preparing to go live with the newest updates in the coming months. Our AI team is also working closely with Smith’s Operations department to design additional AI-based solutions to enhance our quality-control processes. These promising new solutions will help us maximize business opportunities and amplify our service capabilities for our global customers.

We have also steadily built up our IT asset disposition services to support our customers looking for a sustainable new revenue stream. Our in-house-developed, patent-pending ITAD solution—SWIPE®—has driven more than $70 million in growth over the past year. Always one step ahead of the market, we opened our 20,000-square-foot global services hub in Houston, Texas, in 2022 and expanded our ITAD capabilities at our operational facilities in Asia and Europe to scale up this emerging area of our business.

Market data and analysis has been another key area of focus for our Data Science and IT teams. Smith’s unique position in the industry has given us a bird’s-eye view of the global semiconductor supply chain, and we use our decades of knowledge to keep our partners fully informed and to guide their purchasing strategies. As we continue to build upon this data, we have developed new algorithms and other tools to identify and track pricing and demand trends, which has allowed us to provide critical market information to our customers faster than ever before.

These exciting updates were just a small sampling of the many triumphs shared at our 2024 ELEVATE conference. The event underscored how far we have come and—more importantly—how many opportunities we still have in front of us. Technology never stops moving, and neither do we. We left the conference energized and ready to build upon our successes, and I am confident that our IT team will take us to new, innovative heights this year and in the years to come.