Supply Chain

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Design To Cost with Increased Supply Chain Visibility It’s easy to overlook supply chain costs until it’s too late. Electronic design teams face a daunting challenge of meeting deadlines and cost objectives in rapidly fluctuating global markets. With ever-shorter time-to-market requirements, design teams need to understand and mitigate against supply chain risks during the design phase. This is particularly crucial since choices made during the design phase impact 70% of the life cycle cost of a new Read Article

The Benefits of Having an Automated Bill of Materials in Project Management I have some friends who founded a startup company to create and market a brilliant new product. Their product quickly became a success, but all their hard work was constantly undermined by communication issues between departments. It wasn’t long until the engineers found their creative hands tied, purchasing was buried under an avalanche of unreliable documentation, and the product build in manufacturing was slowed to a crawl from incorrect and Read Article

How a Bill of Materials Can Improve Your Supply Chain Management Some of the most complicated engineering projects I’ve worked were made up of multiple layers of sub-assemblies. Before we could order parts for a new assembly, we needed to go through every component in each tier of the final product to ensure that they would meet the rigorous current, voltage, and temperature derating requirements for different customer applications. The first few times I had to do this, it was by merging dozens of excel Read Article

BOM Part Number Management: Why It Should Be Automated If you’ve ever worked with high voltages or have designed a high voltage circuit, you know that they always require careful planning. In my last job, we had been using a particular high voltage power supply circuit for years. When it was initially designed, the board took longer than usual to complete. While its design required some extra finicking, it was worth the effort. Everything was going well until the larger assembly's design was modified Read Article

The Pros and Cons of Having Your Manufacturer Source the Components in Your PCB Design Having your manufacturer source components for you may seem like the fastest and cheapest option. However, this outsourcing may cause some difficulties to arise. After a bad experience with counterfeit components, we began sourcing our own components and never looked back. Counterfeit parts are and incredibly difficult to detect. Having good control over your sources is absolutely essential if you have tight performance or security specifications Read Article

The Wild West of PCB Design - Part Choice Showdown Does your part selection process ever feel like a wild west showdown, where every stakeholder is out to protect their own self-interests at the expense of your own? Learn how to turn your part choice selections into a win-win for your entire design team with a new feature in Altium Designer® 16. Link Does your part selection process ever feel like a scene from a wild west movie, where every stakeholder is out to protect their own self-interests Read Article

Collaborative Design Part 2: Building a Better System The effectiveness of design collaboration is mostly determined by the structure and organization of the system back-end. For the second part of this blog series, we'll take a look at the best structure and practices for version control, and how this really forms a good basis for collaboration. Enter in the lifecycle management and enhanced administrative functionality of a real design release, and you have an even better foundation. From my Read Article

Collaborative Design Part 1: Optimizing PCB Design in Teams Electronic design isn't a solo gig anymore. Teamwork among dozens or hundreds of designers, engineers, suppliers, manufacturers, and any number of other people is essential for bringing a product to market. This blog series explores the ways to cut through the barriers and reduce some of the tedious back-and-forth dialog that slows design cycles to a crawl. In part 1, we'll take a look at what kinds of features make for effective collaboration Read Article

Supply Chain Management: Ensure Component Availability at Design Time Component availability can result in missed deadlines or render a design unproducible. Learn how to the supply chain management capabilities (SCM) in Altium Designer® can mitigate these issues. Read on to find out more about our supply chain management program, raw material, logistics management, and the supply chain manager. Not having insight into component availability can result in a product being late, missing a market window, or not even Read Article

Supply Chain Visibility: Component Sourcing in the New Age The evolution of the PCB design process has seen significant progress in recent years. And much of this progress can be attributed to the continued innovation in the field of electronics. Whether it’s IoT, wearables, medical devices, or telecom, we’ve seen the pace of product development accelerating, along with the rise of small batch projects. With the competitive landscape more crowded than ever, you’re facing tremendous pressure to shorten Read Article

Customize BOM Reports for Consistent Documentation Learn how to clearly communicate proper board assembly with multiple variants with BOM customization in Altium Designer. Upon completion of a design, the project enters the assembly process where the assemblers and/or purchasers rely on trustworthy documentation to provide a list of components, materials, and parts necessary to produce the board design. This document, called the bill of materials (BOM), lists all of the required materials needed Download PDF

Design Data Management Part 2 — The Supply Chain Learn how to verify PCB component availability and pricing directly from your design environment in Altium Designer. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Ensure Component Availability at Design Time - at Altium.com. Download PDF