Orbweaver FORGE: The PIM Solution for the Electronics Industry

For years, companies in the electronics industry have struggled with PIM platforms designed for simpler products and smaller datasets. Managing millions of parts, extreme attribute density, and constant supplier and lifecycle change requires something different. Something purpose-built for this industry. A platform that combines evergreen, normalized part data with inventory, pricing, and behavioral signals to enable automation, analytics, and AI-guided decision-making.

Today, we’re introducing it.

Announcing Orbweaver FORGE

Orbweaver has built the next-generation PIM purpose-engineered for the electronics industry, and it is now available to the market. Developed in close collaboration with some of the industry’s most forward-thinking trading partners—including Rochester Electronics—Orbweaver FORGE was shaped by real-world scale, real data complexity, and real operational demands. This is not a generalized PIM adapted for electronics; it is a platform designed from the ground up to manage millions of components, extreme attribute density, and the constant change inherent in global electronic supply chains.

Directly aimed at legacy PIM solutions such as Informatica, Stibo, and Pimcore, Orbweaver FORGE delivers the performance, scalability, and data governance those platforms were never built to handle at the scale our industry demands. FORGE excels where traditional PIMs break—high-volume ingestion, deep normalization, complex dependencies, and evergreen master data management—while enabling intelligent automation and analytics. For companies operating at the core of the electronics ecosystem, FORGE is the PIM built to keep pace with the industry’s complexity—and turn it into competitive advantage.

Next Generation Part Management for the Electronics Industry

A next-generation PIM extends far beyond traditional data management by serving as an intelligent, evergreen master data management platform. Orbweaver FORGE combines supplier (or manufacturing department) data intake, robust normalization, and governed part catalogs with integrated datasets such as inventory, pricing, and API search behavior. This enables advanced analytics, intelligent automation, and AI-guided decision-making while supporting monetization through premium data services, APIs, and value-added tools. The result is higher operating margins, improved customer satisfaction, scalable data governance, and a future-ready foundation for digital transformation in an increasingly complex electronics industry.

PIM has evolved from a back-office system to a strategic asset, shifting from simple data governance to enabling revenue generation and competitive differentiation.

Normalized, governed part data is the foundation of monetization, enabling premium services such as enhanced search, parametric comparison, and enriched digital catalogs.

Lack of industry-wide standardization is a core challenge, with suppliers or internal departments providing inconsistent and highly variable attribute sets that must be normalized to be usable.

Next-generation PIMs integrate non-traditional datasets, including inventory, pricing, and search behavior, to unlock deeper insights and correlations.

High-quality PIM data enables value-added services, such as lifecycle intelligence, obsolescence prediction, compliance validation, and supply-chain risk analysis.

API-driven data access expands monetization opportunities, allowing authoritative part data to be embedded directly into customer and partner systems.

Evergreen part catalogs are critical, ensuring data remains current, actionable, and reliable across long product lifecycles common in aerospace, medical, and defense markets.

Advanced analytics transform PIM data into customer insight, supporting trend analysis, opportunity identification, and improved customer outcomes.

Next-generation PIM platforms are foundational to AI and automation, enabling intelligent decision-making and long-term digital transformation across the electronics ecosystem.

Evergreen Data

Traditionally companies within the Electronics Industry periodically go through a part data cleansing effort driven by either internal or external data feeds. Internal momentum and opinions build that the current part catalog has become out of date and fragmented across multiple business units.

A Project Manager is assigned. Representatives from Engineering, IT, Marketing, Sales, and Product are assigned to a special initiative and task force, the purpose of which is to clean the Part Catalog. Heaven and earth are moved to understand the part data, identify deficiencies and work through each line item, each source, each data element in sequence until an objective has been reasonably fulfilled.

At the conclusion, maybe a year later, an announcement is made: “The Part Catalog is correct, current and accurate—so say all of us!”. And then the sun sets, and rises the next day, and the Part Catalog is again out of date.

Within the context of a PIM for the electronics industry, “evergreen data” means that ingested part information that is continuously current, governed, and usable over time—not static, point-in-time data. To maintain evergreen data requires a system that can ingest massive part catalogs, determine changes in part data, apply rules to data ingestion to reduce manual interaction, and provide analytical tools to group parts into common change elements for quick analysis, revision and adoption.

Continuously refreshed – Automatically updated as suppliers or internal departments change specifications, lifecycle status, compliance data, pricing, or availability.

Normalized and governed – Mapped into a consistent data model despite wide variation in how different suppliers provide attributes and formats.

Lifecycle-aware – Actively tracks status changes such as Active, NRND, EOL, or Obsolete, which is critical in long-lifecycle electronics markets.

Versioned and traceable – Maintains historical context while ensuring downstream systems always consume the latest authoritative data.

Actionable across systems – Trusted enough to drive search, design-in decisions, sourcing, compliance checks, analytics, and AI-driven automation.

Resilient to data inconsistency – Handles missing, partial, or asymmetric supplier attributes without degrading usability.

In short, evergreen part data turns the part catalog into a living asset—one that remains accurate and monetizable as products, suppliers, and markets evolve—rather than a snapshot that quickly becomes stale and risky in the fast-changing electronics ecosystem.

Not For T-Shirts and Teddy Bears

Part data management in the electronics industry is not a lightweight problem—it is a data-intensive, high-stakes challenge defined by massive scale and constant change. A single environment must ingest and govern millions of components, each with hundreds or thousands of attributes, while accounting for regional regulations, customer-specific entitlements, volume-based pricing, lifecycle status, and supplier variability. Traditional PIM platforms—designed for simple consumer products with a handful of attributes—struggle under this complexity, leading to performance bottlenecks, brittle data models, and stale or unusable information.

Orbweaver FORGE was not built for t-shirts and teddy bears. It was purpose-built for the realities of the electronics ecosystem, where part data is deep, relational, and constantly evolving. FORGE is designed to normalize wildly inconsistent part data, manage dense attribute sets, and maintain complex dependencies without sacrificing performance or accuracy. Its scalable ingestion, governance, and versioning capabilities ensure that even the most complex part records remain trusted, searchable, and usable across every downstream system and channel.

At massive scale, precision becomes a competitive advantage. Orbweaver FORGE delivers an evergreen part catalog that stays current as suppliers, departments, regulations, markets, and customer requirements change. By unifying high-volume data intake with intelligent automation and analytics-ready architecture, FORGE enables faster decisions, higher margins, and better customer outcomes. This is a PIM designed not just to manage complexity—but to turn it into strategic value for the electronics industry.

Data Security

As with all Orbweaver products, we adhere to the highest level of data security and data protection.

SOC 1 and SOC 2 Compliance. Orbweaver adheres to both SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance standards, ensuring the highest levels of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Our systems and processes meet rigorous requirements for securely managing customer data. This includes but is not limited to:

Regularly audited by third-party firms to ensure compliance.

Continuous monitoring and alerting systems to detect and respond to threats.

Robust incident response plan for managing and mitigating security breaches.

Comprehensive employee training programs on data security and privacy policies.

Implementation of stringent access controls and user authentication mechanisms.

Proprietary Encryption Technology. Data is secured using a proprietary 512-bit encryption sequence and then further base64 encoded upon persistence. This data can only be accessed by the supplier and purchaser who want to share that data with one another. Secured data will never be used for any analysis purposes or shared in any way. The Orbweaver system itself does not have access to secured lockbox data. Only the supplier and purchaser have decryption keys (via a proprietary separation-of-concerns mechanism) to unlock that data—those keys are passed into the Orbweaver system at the time a pricing request is made by the purchaser. Beyond the proprietary encryption technologies, all Orbweaver data lives in a hardened, n-Tiered application cluster behind a restrictive firewall and intrusion alert system. All data integration points are protected by standard HTTP SSL encryption (where appropriate), and we follow all industry-standard application security best practices.

Proprietary Terms of Service Tagging. All data (including pricing, availability, and manufacturer data) is tagged with Terms of Service when it enters the Orbweaver system, and all users accessing the data are likewise granted a role based on their job function. All data access is then restricted by the Role of the User in order to strictly conform to the Terms of Service as provided by each individual data provider.