Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
SEPTEMBER 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 37 Decker-Weiss: It assists by rec- ognizing typical field names: "Based on my experience, this looks a lot like a manufacturer part number, or the other way around, this does not look like a manufacturer part number. It doesn't have any of the rules. ese are typical manufactur- er names. ey are not infinite. ere are a certain number of parts manufacturers on the mar- ket." It should do checking, like you've got some incon- sistencies, your manufacturer part number doesn't actually match the description, things like that. It doesn't make sense to take a faulty or in- complete BOM and start pricing it because you're just going to start pricing in your mis- take. If there are inconsistencies there and the quantities don't match, the board doesn't match the BOM, waiting and pushing that un- der the rug by saying, "Well, let's just go to procurement anyway," is just kicking the can down the line and even worse, making sure that if there's a problem, it will eventually get revealed. e question is just how much ener- gy, pain, and money will it going to cost you when you discover that problem? So, let's dis- cover them earlier. Matties: Sooner is better, right? Mark Laing: I think this is indicative of the BOM scrubbing capability; if you go back five or 10 years, BOM files were fairly straightforward. ey were typically single line. People were us- ing alternate parts and what we've seen is that's expanded a lot to the point where a customer I spoke to yesterday said, "My tool doesn't read an Excel file and most of the BOMs I get are an Excel file format. I have to manually remove all the AVL data because it can't handle the AVL data." e cleanup that we're talking about is to be able to extract that. We could be talking of five or six alternate parts and one isn't quite right. So, you want to pull in as much of that as you can and then be able to correct and adjust the stuff that isn't, and not just throw everything out and say, "Let me just get a little bit enough to get the job done." at doesn't work when you're looking at the different quot- ing aspects, especially in today's supply chain challenges, where if you can't get certain parts, you want to try and get another part, but you want to get a part that fits physically and electrical- ly. at's an incredibly important thing and I think we've seen that in the last 18 months how important it is to extract as much as we can be- cause that gives you options downstream. Johnson: e supply chain right now requires a great deal of flexibility thanks to changing lead times, etc. Finding suitable, functional copy exact qualifiable alternates is something that the procurement people are doing constantly. How does BOM Connector assist with that? Decker-Weiss: When we first started out, we were a BOM scrubbing tool, which did a little bit of quoting. Now we're a quoting tool that has BOM scrubbing as a necessity in order to get to your quality. Most customers buy BOM Connector today because of supply chain has- sles, so that really has become the focus of the tool. It does that in several ways. First, we are database-driven, so it all starts with a founda- tion. You have a database as opposed to a cal- culator, which essentially, Excel is just a fan- cy calculator. We're exchanging a calculator file-based tool with a central database tool, so that's how we start. en we take advantage of something which is still relatively new in the supply chain, which is that distributors and manufacturers allow third parties to develop direct interfaces to Mark Laing