P5 Platform
12 Days of BOM & Procurement Risk Management Resources
Day 1: Avoid a Nightmare Before Christmas
A cautionary tale: In 2001, a few days before the December holidays, Sony was forced to remove 1.3 million PlayStation gaming consoles from stores because of a high concentration of poisonous cadmium metal, costing them nearly a quarter million dollars’ worth of revenue lost.
This winter, take the necessary steps to avoid the risk of a compliance fiasco from delaying your product design, or even worse, leading to a recall or removal from the market. Hiring compliance law firms can be expensive and costs easily reach the $1 million dollar mark. Also, compliance software will not always contain the compliance info you need for the parts in your product.
There are two solutions to help your product stay compliant.
- Software automation – simply load your BOM of parts into our system and get an instant health status on which parts meet or fail major compliance regulations around the globe. Then choose a suitable pin-to-pin replacement for parts that fail compliance.
- Yearly compliance reports – having our team of 500 data analysts pull a yearly compliance roll up report is much more cost-effective than a compliance law firm. Download a free sample report here:
Day 2: How to Meet Environmental Compliance
Confused about compliance regulations in North America vs Europe? Wondering what a Conflict Mineral roll-up report is? Here’s a handy guide to compliance regulations and how to meet them. Also, we have included three free reports!
Day 3: Webinar on How AI Can Solve the Chip Shortage
Over 751,000 electronic components went obsolete in 2021. Over 25% of parts with End-of-Life PCNs are slated for immediate obsolescence. How can companies account for end-of-life to ensure their design will not be obsolete by the time the product is ready for market?
In this webinar, we show how machine learning algorithms are used to predict years to end of life and help you choose electronic parts that are not at risk of going obsolete soon.
Day 4: Podcast – Procurement and Engineering Need to Sync
To combat supply chain challenges in electronics, communication needs to improve between procurement and engineering teams. Empowering the engineers with information on components and providing a list of low-risk parts that meet the required specifications of the product will result in faster time-to-market and less time wasted on redesigning.
Day 5: How to Combat Counterfeiting in Electronics
A dangerous concern in electronics is the existence of counterfeit microchips, which are obsolete or used chips pulled out of devices in landfills. These are then repackaged and sold on the market to manufacturers. The United States military estimates that 15% of all purchased parts are counterfeit.
Experts advise companies to increase their awareness and visibility into their supply chain as well as sourcing only from verified and authorized vendors. However, SiliconExpert has a better solution:
- First, we have developed a counterfeit risk algorithm that measures the likelihood of a component being targeted by counterfeiters.
- Next, users are proactively alerted when we send GIDEP reports on the emergence of counterfeit issues. Finally, to allow our manufacturers to authenticate components, we include part marking images sourced from the chip fabs to help you visually confirm the authenticity of a chip.
To learn more about our methods on protecting your products from fake and counterfeit electronics parts, read our free e-book:
Day 6: Alternative Parts Could Save Your Product
One of the most frustrating aspects of electronics product design is when a critical component is no longer usable due to going obsolete, failing compliance, or simply being unprocurable. This issue can be proactively corrected by factoring in the total number of alternatives (or similar parts) available.
- DS1339AU+, Real-Time Clock (RTC) device, 780 pin-to-pin alternatives available
- DS1308U-18+, Real-Time Clock (RTC) device, 33 pin-to-pin alternatives
- DS1371U+, Real-Time Clock (RTC) device, 2 pin-to-pin alternatives
By selecting parts with many alternatives and pin-to-pin matches, the risk of a supply chain shortage is greatly diminished. Learn more about our alternatives report by downloading a free procurement report:
Day 7: Three Major Challenges that Design Engineers Face
Electrical engineers have revealed the top challenges they face while designing a product.
- Finding parts that meet their exact specifications
- Finding multi-sourced parts or parts with plenty of alternatives
- Reliability or quality issues with parts, leading to a redesign
SiliconExpert’s Part Search solves all these issues with a powerful parametric Part Search engine across the largest database of electronic parts. With the parametric search feature, engineers can quickly narrow down the parts with exact specifications that meet their needs, from operating supply voltage (V) to input signal type being either differential or single-ended. The available number of alternatives, or similar parts, are included in this parametric search feature.
An added feature is SiliconExpert’s unique Years-to-End-of-Life predictor. Using historical part data and a powerful machine learning algorithm, the YTEOL can be predicted with a 92.7% accuracy rate. This gives engineers a strong point of consideration when choosing a part to last the entire lifetime from product design to selling the product in retail markets and having active parts to use when servicing or repairing the product.
Learn more about how to overcome these three major challenges:
Day 8: Preparing for Change in the Semiconductor Industry
Between COVID lockdowns, geopolitical disruptions, and investments into the semiconductor industry in countries like the US and India, the question becomes: “How does your company fit into the changing global stage of the semiconductor industry?”
In SiliconExpert’s two-part podcast series with industry expert, Patrick Wilson, we take a deep dive into manufacturing decisions made on Capitol Hill, the U.S. Chips Act, and how the U.S. government plans to support manufacturing, R&D, and the security of the national supply chain. Listen to his unique perspective on the importance of bringing chip manufacturing to the US:
Day 9: Sudden Supply Chain Shortages & How to Prevent Them
When a manufacturer is managing the procurement for multiple products, managing the entire portfolio of parts can be daunting. Especially when procurement teams must go line-by-line and check on the status of each part. Having visibility at a multi-BOM level can save your company from sudden shortages.
Our Business Intelligence Solution allows companies to grab any or every component from their portfolio and access any immediate risk to the procurement process.
- Sharp decreases in inventory
- Sharp increases in delivery / lead time
- A historical trend of inventory levels for selected parts
Learn more about how to gain a macro-level view of your product portfolio and get ahead of any procurement risks: https://www.siliconexpert.com/sebis/
Day 10: Three Reasons to NOT Use Excel for BOM Management
Millions of organizations manage critical parts of their organization on Excel. Why? It is cheap and easy to use in the early stages of the company.
Spreadsheets work well for ad-hoc analysis, reporting, and other common tasks. However, they are not designed to be used in the manner with which most companies use them today. Huge inefficiencies and risks can occur when large manufacturers use spreadsheets to manage their bill-of-materials
Excel work is manual, subject to bandwidth of the person, difficult to validate, and clumsy to work with in collaborative business processes. Excel fails to be a safe and effective tool for BOM Management and results in three major pitfalls:
- Slow Process Flow & Decision Making
- Human Error
- Difficultly when Auditing
Automating this incredibly tedious and time-consuming process of data entry not only improves accuracy and speed but opens the opportunity to proactively find and address risks. Generate reports and charts, get automatic risk alerts, and rely on our team to deliver real-time accurate information.
Image: Examples of the Errors of Manual BOM Management through Excel:
Day 11: Webinar on How to Source the Right Parts
Designing sustainable products require engineers and procurement managers to find parts that fit the design, meet compliance, and are readily available at a good price point. However, even the best laid plans can go to waste in the face of global pandemics, wars and natural disasters. These disruptions lead to delays in production, respins, lost revenue and market share.
Listen in as Dwight Morse, Group PM of Supply Chain at SiliconExpert, explains how manufacturers can still add a layer of resilience simply by looking at several factors when it comes to choosing components.
- Source only from trusted suppliers with reliable components
- Have a backup plan in place – find parts with pin-to-pin alternatives
- Mitigate geographical risk by sourcing from multiple locations
- Stay up to date on the latest product notifications and event news
Day 12: Tools for Success in 2023!
The ever-changing landscape of the electronics industry can be a tough one to navigate. Over the last 12 days, we’ve given tips and resources that can be used to help plan, prepare, and maneuver through your company’s design process.
In 2022 SiliconExpert has worked tirelessly to improve and create tools and reports that keep tabs on supply chain disruptions including compliance, part replacement, multi BOM-reporting, high-risk parts tracking, and more! If you have more than one Bill of Materials that needs checked over or have been burned by non-compliant parts in the past, we’ve got your back. Scheduled a free trial today to get ahead of 2023 disruptions.
Stay tuned
More Days of Resources to Come!
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