Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1067105
JANUARY 2019 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 33 that are in high demand and have scarcity, and we see that. I don't want to overstate the relevance of the information and data that we have at Octopart, but I do believe that we have our finger on the pulse of activity in the indus- try. With our data, we're trying to use that to help our search experience, and people find what they're looking for more readily based on the volume of searches we're seeing and the types of commodities that are being searched. So, we are seeing an uptick in activity overall, and spikes inside of specific commodities that are constrained. Stephen Las Marias: We're seeing that design- ers have to make obsolete some of the compo- nents that they are designing into the circuits and products that they're doing because of obsolescence issues when it comes to appli- cations. The product would have to work for longer, for 10–15 years. From your perspective, how does this impact the industry? Schoenfelder: I would say that if there is a specific area where there's deficient informa- tion in our industry, it's around obsolescence of products. There's not any one reliable place to get information across several product and commodity categories. And the information that is out there is often not accurate if you talk to specific manufacturers about their plans for the end of life in products and/or discontinu- ance. It's hard to find any resource out there that is extremely good at either identifying or predicting obsolescence. There's no question that contributes to activity on Octopart. That is a piece of this scarcity that we just referenced, but obsolescence is a piece of that too. There's no question that one of the big value props of Octopart is the aggregation of infor- mation. When times of scarcity come, we are a place where consumers of products can deter- mine if there's availability in the marketplace across hundreds of distributors around the globe. That is certainly one of the good use cases for Octopart. When there are times where a device is constrained, users will flock to Octopart to see what inventory exists and how they can secure that inventory for their products. Johnson: From a supply chain perspective, it seems to me that a company like Octopart would be useful to the manufacturers and distributors to communicate that sort of avail- ability information. How are you developing that conversation? Schoenfelder: That's a great question, Nolan. Thank you for asking that. For us, we've pretty much talked about our user experience on-site today, which is extremely powerful but typi- cally limited to one query at a time. There are a couple of ways that we're addressing more enterprise-grade solutions through Octopart. One is we have a BOM tool on our site where users can upload an entire bill of materials to get information back—pricing and availability being the primary value there. We also have the Octopart API, and our API is extremely powerful in that it has excellent documentation. We also provide the pricing and availability I just referred to in our BOM tool. In addition to that, we have technical specifications, data sheets, and other technical elements available through our API. We have enterprise-grade customers that come to us to supplement the supply chain information that they require in their ERP and MRP systems, and then also to help them again on the MRP side more with resource planning for materi- als. Our API, while we're working on enhance- ments for it right now, still has a significant amount of usage and use cases for enterprise- grade customers. We have a BOM tool on our site where users can upload an entire bill of materials to get information back—pricing and availability being the primary value there.