A conversation with Sanjay Huprikar, Chief Global Officer of the Global Electronics Association
Electronics manufacturing sits at the center of modern life and, increasingly, at the center of modern disruption. On a recent episode of The Operations Science Podcast, OSI’s Managing Director, Ed Pound, spoke with Sanjay Huprikar, the recently named Chief Global Officer of the Global Electronics Association (GEA), formerly IPC. GEA supports the electronics ecosystem through standards, training, advocacy, and industry programs, serving a global membership that now exceeds 3,200 companies.
Sanjay shared his history with operations science/factory physics, which makes it especially interesting to hear how he connects today’s headlines—tariffs, volatility, workforce gaps, and AI—back to the fundamentals of manufacturing performance.
Tariffs are “only half the ball game”
Trade policy and tariffs are top of mind for global manufacturing organizations, and Sanjay’s message was direct: GEA does not believe tariffs are the preferred solution. In practice, tariffs rarely produce a universal “win.” They create winners and losers—often inside the same value chain—because a global industry is really a network of regional supply chains that rely on each other.
However, Sanjay emphasized an important nuance. If governments choose to implement tariffs for protectionist reasons, tariffs alone are not a strategy. They must be paired with policies that build domestic capability and capacity. Otherwise, the downstream impact is predictable: domestic suppliers may not have the scale or capability to meet demand, which drives cost increases, longer lead times, and customer pain. As he put it, implementing tariffs without investing in manufacturing capacity and capability becomes “a no-win situation for everybody.”
He also noted the practical reality that meaningful industrial policy moves slowly. These conversations take years—often 5 to 10—to translate into tangible programs. But the work starts by shaping the conversation now.
A compounding set of challenges
Tariffs are only one piece of a much broader challenge stack. Sanjay highlighted the pressures electronics manufacturers are navigating simultaneously: demand volatility, cybersecurity threats, supply chain disruption, geopolitical instability, raw material costs, skills and labor shortages, and an increasingly complex regulatory and sustainability environment.
Margins are often thin in electronics manufacturing so leaders have less room for error. A disruption, a compliance shift, or a sudden demand change can quickly cascade into missed deliveries or increased cost. It is not surprising that resilience has become a dominant theme.
Who GEA represents: mostly small companies
GEA’s membership distribution helps explain why these issues feel so acute. Sanjay shared that GEA is now roughly split between North America and the rest of the world—an international growth story over the last decade. But the size profile is the more striking point: roughly 80% of GA members have annual turnover under $25M, while about 10% exceed $2.5B.
That means many small and midsize manufacturers are facing global complexity without the resources—financial, staffing, and technical—that large enterprises can deploy. It also explains why consolidation and private equity activity continues: slim margins can still be attractive when scale and volume opportunities exist.
Five pillars of supply chain resilience
When companies talk about resilience, the concept can become vague. Sanjay offered a structured view of what GEA focuses on—five pillars that together define supply chain resilience:
Global trade and access: trusted supply chains, export controls, and workable trade policy.
Country and regional capabilities: nearshoring only works if capability, incentives, and capacity exist.
Technology adoption: innovation and automation as practical resilience tools, not just “nice-to-haves.”
Supply chain harmonization: workforce, standards, sustainability practices, and quality expectations—the shared discipline of an industry.
Industry intelligence: credible market data and benchmarking so companies can understand where they stand and where they are exposed.
For operations leaders, this is a useful framework because it breaks resilience into actionable categories—some internal, some external, and all connected.
Operations Science: widely needed, unevenly adopted in EMS and PCB industries
One of the most important moments in the conversation was Sanjay’s perspective on Operations Science itself. He said plainly that he wishes more companies would adopt it. In his view, many organizations practice pieces—often under Lean—but miss the integrated logic: variability is real, buffers must be designed intentionally, and there are explicit trade-offs among capacity, inventory, and time.
Electronics manufacturing is a particularly strong fit for this thinking because much of the EMS world operates in high-mix, low-volume conditions. That environment punishes simplistic approaches and rewards leaders who understand the science of flow, variability, and buffering and can apply those concepts in practice.
AI: real gains, uneven adoption
AI is already creating measurable advances in electronics manufacturing—especially in design optimization, predictive maintenance, AI-driven visual inspection, and faster test sequences. But Sanjay was clear that much of this progress is concentrated among cutting-edge companies. A key role for GEA, as he sees it, is accelerating broader adoption so that the “middle of the market” benefits—not just the leaders.
The bottom line
The electronics industry faces a volatile landscape where policy, technology, workforce capability, and supply chain design intersect. The companies that win will be the ones that respond with disciplined decision-making—managing variability, designing buffers intentionally, building skills systematically, and adopting technology pragmatically. That is the science of working better, applied to one of the world’s most essential industries.
See below for a link to the full podcast episode.
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