Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
36 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2021 By the time you've identified what has changed and manual- ly made the changes, you real- ize it is just wasted time spent on a mission-critical step. One mistake in a thousand-line BOM ruins your entire production. ere is no room for error in the BOM, which is exactly not the process you want to be do- ing manually. en, we started hearing from customers, "is is a great scrubbing tool. e rea- son I need to scrub my BOMs is I need to quote them. I would really like to stay in this tool and not have to go into Excel or some other tool. Could you add some com- ponent sourcing features to it?" at's how it grew into a BOM/component price quoting tool. Johnson: You're providing BOM scrubbing and component quoting, as well as aggregating what the BOM will cost you to purchase. How does a user interact with this tool to scrub the BOM? Decker-Weiss: It starts with just having a very flexible, smart BOM reader. Developing a BOM reader is a lot more perspiration than inspira- tion. You need experience and to have seen a lot of BOMs. You need to understand it needs to be specific for the electronics market. at's another issue we saw in tools on the market. ey might say, "A BOM for a PCB is just like a BOM for a bicycle," but anybody who works in electronics knows that's not the case. From a very high level it is, but from an oper- ational level, you have very important data for electronics. Reference designators are impor- tant. On a bicycle, who cares if it's screw six or screw seven, but on a PCB, C7 or C6 makes all the difference in the world from a production standpoint. ere are a lot of very electronics- specific things in a BOM that you need to be able to recognize, identify, and clean up as eas- ily and as quickly as possible. at's really where it all starts— being able to get all these differ- ent types of BOMs cleanly into the system with no loss of data. Barry Matties: Kevin, you're say- ing good in/good out? Decker-Weiss: Yes. Matties: It's really a product of the discipline of the user input- ting the information. e tool streamlines the process, but it's still a human interface that regulates the quality of the con- tent. Decker-Weiss: If I do something once, I shouldn't have to do it again. e system should be smart enough to know though you did all this work, something in the BOM structure has changed. Take a look and make sure that your settings still apply. It needs to be smart, but it needs to reduce those repeat efforts. at's the first thing. Matties: Would you consider it to be an AI function if the BOM is anticipating? Decker-Weiss: I would. Matties: at really evolves within your prod- uct, I would think. Decker-Weiss: Correct. ere is a debate amongst developers as to what classifies as real AI, but that is such an esoteric discus- sion sometimes. e truth is, it's a learning sys- tem. Like any good product, it gets smarter the more you use it. Matties: How does it assist the BOM reader? Is it possible to reach a point where somebody who may not have all that experience can be as efficient? Kevin Decker-Weiss