Part Information Management: The Electronics Industry’s Biggest Problem

The electronics industry is complex, and every business process in the industry incorporates part data. From design organization to the procurement cycle, the processes of the electronics industry depend on and incorporate critical part data such as parametric data, lifecycle information, and compliance data. This level of part-level detail and intelligence is unique to the electronics industry as opposed to consumer products.

The Scale of the Problem

Unlike buying a t-shirt online, which has perhaps a few colors and sizes, it is not unusual for an electronic component to have hundreds of various attributes or characteristics producing hundreds of thousands of theoretical configurations for one single part. Manufacturers and distributors alike then have the challenges of managing catalogs exceeding tens of millions of parts, and each part having hundreds of pieces of supporting data: physical attributes, electrical characteristic data, associated media files, compliance data, lot numbers, country of origin/diffusion, tariff codes, and much more.

The Procurement Conversation

All of that already-complex part data is used in an incredibly complex ‘Procurement Conversation’ which requires engineering-ready part data, RFQs/Quote Responses, POs, COs, ASNs, AVL/AMLs, Design Registrations, Contracts, Authorizations & Debits, POS data, Forecasts, invoices, and so many more. What’s at the center of every single one of those documents and processes? You guessed it: it’s part data.

A PIM is a centralized platform for the normalization and management of part data. It acts as a single source of truth for that data, enabling it to be distributed to internal stakeholders and external partners, customers, and distributors. Fragmented data across multiple systems, multiple business units, or locked in non-digital repositories or files limits a company’s ability to ensure business transactions reference accurate part data. Similarly, inaccessible or invalid data reduces opportunities for components to be discovered by designers and engineers during critical design-win opportunities.

When Systems Fail, They Fail Hard

It is then not a surprise that our processes are beginning to crumble under the pressure of shrinking margins, consumer price pressures, market uncertainty, reduced product life-cycles, geopolitical uneasiness, and global pandemics. When these issues arise, current systems and processes do not degrade gracefully – rather, they generate more work in the form of more checks, more exceptions, and more effort spent compensating for data that would have prevented the problems from arising.

Speed Is Survival

A process that requires a person to hand another person a piece of information, or that requires the exchange of emails, texts, or phone calls, or even a clunky web search is already too slow and too brittle to survive this new era of supply chain management. Before you can fix your website search, or your RFQ process, or your PO intake process, or nearly any other business process, you need reliable, consistent part data that is easily accessible across your entire organization.

In the electronics industry, part information management is not an operational detail—it is the underlying infrastructure that determines whether digital transformation succeeds or fails.