Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
40 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2021 sign tool you can start BOM Connector and we encourage very much that designers start do- ing it as well. Our slogan is it's never too early to start thinking about the right part. Unfortu- nately, a lot of EMS companies have minimal connections to the design team. ey get a de- sign and it's finished. You are right; oentimes, people start using the tool too late. Johnson: For the design team and procurement point-of-view, your tool starts to fill in a gap in the digital twin. ere's also a back annota- tion feature you find yourself in the middle of as well. A design team just procured this one particular part from this particular distributor, it's actually an alternative to the primary spec part, and it's going into these individual specif- ic assemblies. Your tool can provide informa- tion for that provenance. Is that something you see BOM Connector doing? Decker-Weiss: Absolutely. Just as a price and availability gatherer that's looking far too nar- row because it's the processes that are impor- tant and being part of the process. And that's why our connection with Siemens is so impor- tant because it really fits perfectly into, as you said, the digital twin concept, just the over- all process, a step. We've been talking up un- til now just about material costs, but produc- tion costs are about a quarter of the final prod- uct cost as well. Laing: In general, the material cost is about three-quarters of the overall price, but it's not just the parts; they don't magically turn into a product. You must assemble those parts on a PCB and put PCBs together. Other mechani- cal pieces that are part of that process ultimate- ly drive the product cost. is is an area that I think is definitely very open at the moment. Johnson: With all the various CAD tools on the market, how heterogeneous is the input do- main, if you will, with respect to bringing data into BOM Connector? Decker-Weiss: We decided to focus primarily on the EMS market, as opposed to the OEM market. e OEM market would have the ad- vantage of being far less heterogeneous; you have just a few major systems. SAP is proba- bly being used by 80% of OEMs. In the EMS market, you have a lot of ERP systems, so we have to have a lot of ERP connections. You have so many different types of BOMs and for- mats. You have so many different types of CAD formats. Yes, most are using ODB++, but you still have about a dozen different CAD systems producing different types of things. It's a very heterogeneous market. On the supplier side, you have lots of suppliers; on the manufacturer side, you have constant fusion of manufactur- ers and everything else. One of our unique selling points is that we do not, or do very little, specify to a user that this is what you must do, this is the format you have to use, this is the way to your data needs to look. e flexibility is key there. When you get into production costing, it's even more be- cause you have so many different machines and lines and everything else. Johnson: Are you supporting IPC-2581? Decker-Weiss: Yes. Laing: In general, we're supporting quite a few historical formats. We want intelligent data be- cause intelligent data we can read and inter- pret. We have the tools to handle even Ger- ber files and convert them into a level of intelli- gence, but there's extra work involved. We can do it, we've got the tools to do it, but we very much push our customers to see if there is a better way, or can they find the intelligent data because it's a button push with intelligent data. We know how to deal with it. We know how to read it. We know how to extract information, and that's what we pass over into BOM Con- nector, to create the process quotes. e thing with the process quotes is we're not just taking this number and multiplying it