Clean up your BOM

Aware of this recurring problem from firsthand experience, Ciiva was formed to develop a solution. The result is a suite of 'collaborative and intelligent BoM management tools' and, according to CEO and co-founder Leigh Gawne, the tools are getting a favourable response and he expects the user base to grow fivefold over the course of 2014. The solution effectively comes in two parts. Gawne explains: "The search engine is essentially the information resource and the BoM management tool leverages that information resource. The search capability is tightly integrated into the BoM management tool. "We call it a real time collaborative tool, so you can have a team of people working on the same component library and the same BoM together – any changes made by one user are reflected to the other users in real time. Today, particularly with small companies, it can get very fragmented very quickly and changing a component in one spreadsheet will not be corrected elsewhere automatically. Ciiva solves that problem because you have a central component library to which every BoM is linked." Information includes component datasheets, availability (both current and historical), alternatives and where they have been used in the past. It also presents the offerings of the top 20 distributors and several smaller ones, so it is not tied to the ranges (and prices) of a single distributor. Gawne also believes the tools could benefit the 'commercial efficiency' of the product design process. "It is designed to bring purchasing people closer to the designer," he commented. "Historically there has been a big split between the two. "An engineer might not think too much about cost when designing in a component, but this tool gives access to the information to help them make better decisions throughout the design-in process. Essentially, we are providing data to allow people to make better decisions. Because procurement and designers can now work on the same platform, there is a fundamentally better information flow."