Cofactr Partners with Altium

Collaborating to increase manufacturability of PCBA through proactive supply chain de-risking

New York, February, 25 2024 - Cofactr is excited to announce a partnership with Altium and Nexar. This integration and partnership lets engineering teams and procurement teams design and manufacture electronic products with supply resilience built in from component selection through scale and provides more visibility across teams than ever before. 

The partnership is represented through two unique opportunities for Cofactr and Altium’s shared user base:

1. An integration between Cofactr’s supply chain optimization and automation software and Altium 365, allowing bills of material to seamlessly populate into Cofactr for analysis of procurability and supply chain resilience in the context of parts libraries, existing inventory, and organization-wide production plans.
2. A 5-year partnership with Nexar’s Spectra SCR (Supply Chain Resilience) that provides historical and predictive procurability data to empower engineering teams to select components with a healthy supply chain position and enable procurement teams to optimize their risk and cash-flow management strategies.

“When making component choices during NPI, especially in critical industries like aerospace and defense, it’s imperative to select parts that are available not just today, but throughout a product’s full lifecycle.” said Matthew Haber, CEO of Cofactr. “Being able to seamlessly integrate Altium 365 BOMs into Cofactr and then contextualize components against existing inventory, demand, and historical/predictive supply data is a game changer for hardware manufacturers when it comes to building health electronic supply chains. We’re equipping teams with technology that does everything short of guaranteeing that parts will be available for those builds.”

An incomplete view of the supply chain or delays in design changes being communicated between stakeholders can lead to inaccurate procurement strategy, delays in manufacturing, and cost overruns. Potentially more damaging, certification of a product containing components in limited supply, or that may face limited supply soon, can lead to unfulfillable demand. Connecting design data between electrical engineering teams and procurement teams with Nexar’s Spectra data and Cofactr’s unified inventory and market data can dramatically mitigate these challenges through more strategic parts choices in NPI and continuous monitoring of global supply against demand. 

“Altium has long been invested in seamless execution, from engineering processes in Altium to manufactured PCBAs landing ready for final build into our customers' products.” writes Daniel Schoenfelder, SVP of Corporate Business Transformation for Altium. “Cofactr’s actionable market data and operational infrastructure is a natural fit for that mission. Surfacing potential opportunities and challenges in the supply chain in early design stages can cut time to market and provide huge savings to OEMs.”When component supply challenges appear, it often means valuable engineering hours will be spent solving avoidable challenges or, worse, needing to re-spin boards. In more severe situations, a BOM may be locked due to compliance and certification considerations, meaning production can’t move forward until the exact components specified in the original design are procurable. These kinds of issues can be crippling to profitability and on-time delivery. 

“Being on time and on budget isn’t an option, it's a necessity, and the partnership of Altium and Cofactr provides a huge leap forward for ensuring successful delivery of products,” added Altium’s Dan Schoenfelder.

Cofactr’s Altium 365 integration is live, and Nexar’s Spectra SCR is now available in Beta for select customers. 

About Altium

Altium, LLC (ASX:ALU) is a global software company headquartered in San Diego, California, accelerating the pace of innovation through electronics. For over 30 years, Altium has been delivering software that maximizes the productivity of PCB designers and electrical engineers. From individual inventors to multinational corporations, more PCB designers and engineers choose Altium software to design and realize electronics-based products.

Nexar, a Business Unit of Altium, LLC (ASX:ALU), is a cloud-based solutions platform that is reinventing the business of electronics. Nexar’s solutions seamlessly integrate the Altium ecosystem for PCB designers and engineers. The Nexar platform includes Octopart.com, the world's most trusted electronic component search engine, and Spectra, a data intelligence suite.

About Cofactr

Cofactr is the most extensive end-to-end platform for integrating supply chain data, BOM management, procurement automation, and inventory for electronics manufacturers, integrated with a global supplier network and electronics-specific 3PL services. Cofactr is used across electrical engineering, procurement, and program teams, unifying inventory, procurement, demand, and design documentation to accelerate manufacturing and reduce risk in electronics.