Arena and SiliconExpert Webinar

Full transcript below:

Paul Welch:

Hello, everyone. And welcome to today’s webinar on improving the health of your bill of materials. I’m Paul Welch from Arena and joining me today to present is John Mastropietro from SiliconExpert. John, I’m going to go ahead and hand things over to you.

John Mastropietro:

Great. Thanks, Paul. Hi, Paul. Hello, everyone attending. Thank you for taking the time to join the conference today. I’m John Mastropietro with SiliconExpert, and I work closely with our channel partner Arena PLM on the integration of SiliconExpert data into the Arena PLM tool.

For today’s webinar, we’ll discuss the integration between the two tools, and how this integration will help manage and maintain a clean bill of material as it relates to electronic components. During the webinar, we’ll give a review and introduction of SiliconExpert, the roles and responsibilities within an organization, and the challenges they may face in maintaining a healthy bill of material. How the feature set between Arena and SiliconExpert will help solve many of these challenges. And, finally, Paul will give a product demonstration.

As we get started, I’d like to do a quick introduction to SiliconExpert. At SiliconExpert, we’re a software and services company serving the semiconductor electronic component industry with a database in excess of 350 million components, representing over 15,000 original component manufacturers. From this comprehensive database, you can see that SiliconExpert can help you make the right decision faster when it comes to managing risk, highlighting risky components that may be heading towards the end of their product lifecycle, or facing long lead times, avoiding redesign. Providing form-fit-and-function cross references and second sources to components that are facing product obsolescence, and mitigating obsolescence by providing alerts for PDNs and PCNs, which allow you to catch the last time by events as they happen in real time. This is especially true as OCN MNA activity will sometimes see an overlap in product lines, which may result in product discontinuation. We will take a deeper dive into each one of these areas and also discuss how this information can help every major role within an organization.

Evaluate and take actions on the risks in your bill of materials. Many critical factors play a role in maintaining a healthy bill of materials and these can be broken down into four key areas—key areas in which Arena PLM and SiliconExpert provide component data visibility right from within the Arena PLM environment. So, what are these critical factors? For starters, the component product lifecycle is a key indicator. What is the lifecycle status of each device? Has a component recently moved to not recommended for new design? Even more critical, has it gone obsolete and was this obsolescence notice delivered in time for you to make informed decisions before that device is no longer available?

Inventories. Inventory levels also play a role and it’s important to have real-time accurate information to extended lead times and times of product allocation, events that can make procuring components a real challenge. We’ll see a little later in the presentation how environmental factors such as REACH and RoHS compliance regulations also play a part in all of this.

So, how does the integration between SiliconExpert and Arena help mitigate some of these challenges? Well, for one, they monitor and highlight such events in real time and provide notifications as they occur. Paul will demonstrate some of this during the product demonstration. Provide form-fit-and-functional crosses and alternatives. Multisource options to those components that are affected. All of this data and more, powered by SiliconExpert, is available directly and seamlessly—all from within the Arena PLM tool.

Ensure compliance and collect complete data for all materials used in the making of an electronic component. The dynamics and environmental compliance is constantly changing, and it’s critical in having that compliance data set in evaluating the health of your BOM from a regulations perspective. Today, we have REACH, RoHS, RoHS2, WEEE, China RoHS, and more, all within this data being included in the SiliconExpert database. In most cases, that data is a direct feed from our supplier partners, which guarantees accuracy and freshness of the information. Some of that information, including the CMRTs and all the material declarations.

Diving deeper into environmental compliance, we talk a little bit more about the topic of conflict minerals. For those not familiar with conflict minerals and its reporting it’s the collection and reporting of four of the most commonly mined conflict minerals: tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold, also known as 3TGs. These conflict minerals are extracted from the Eastern Congo and are essential in the manufacturing of electronic components. Data is essential and assurance is critical, and another area where the SiliconExpert and Arena PLM teams work together to collect, manage, aggregate, and report conflict minerals’ data from suppliers.

So, who benefits? Everyone. Different roles face different challenges and having the component data insights powered by SiliconExpert integrated within Arena PLM provides the data required to help solve each of these challenges. As you can see from the slide, we touch every major role within an organization which supports every phase of the product lifecycle. On the front end of a design, it’s the design engineer that requires parametric search capabilities, data sheets, and easy access to PCNs. As a product moves from design to manufacturing and production, it’s the manufacturing and component engineering teams that require lifecycle status, counterfeit reporting, form-fit-and-functional replacements for components that have gone or are about to go obsolete.

As we’ve discussed the importance of compliance, it’s the materials and compliance manager requiring regulation status, and conflict mineral reporting templates. It’s the supply chain and procurement teams that need information such as inventory availability, lead times, and pricing. Again, each role faces a different set of problems, all with a solution through the integration between SiliconExpert component data insights and Arena PLM.

Taking a look at the key features behind the integration between SiliconExpert and Arena PLM, we can quickly see the value and key features and benefits in integrating. As Paul will highlight as part of the product demonstration, the tool set features a graphical representation of the overall health of a BOM with color-coded indicators. This allows the user to quickly and accurately identify and mitigate risk factors, such as lifecycle status, regulatory compliance, and a market availability. Lifecycle status to help catch component obsolescence issues before they happen, regulation and compliance data helps to save time and resources to ensure higher product quality. Quickly identify product availability, long lead times, and potential in price increases. And, finally, crosses in alternatives to help in finding form-fit-and-functional cross references, helping to mitigate redesign, and ultimately extending the lifecycle of your end product. And with that, we will launch into the demo, as Paul will highlight the key features and benefits.

Paul Welch:

Great. Thank you, John. Okay, all right, so I’m in Arena and I am looking at an assembly and this is my PCBA EveryRoad. If I go to my bill of materials, I’ll normally look at the indented bill of materials first. And this is all of my Arena data. So, I’ve set up my items on my BOM and I’ve got my sourcing set up. But, now, what if I want to see from a more in-depth view of what’s going on with the components on this bill of materials? And that’s where this integration really, really helps me. As John mentioned, there are many, many roles who need to drill down and find out this information, things like lifecycle, market availability, compliance, crosses. And any of those roles can come in and use this integration view to see what’s happening at a more detailed look at what’s going on with these parts.

And so, on this view, let me just describe what’s going on here. So, everything under this blue bar where you can see SiliconExpert’s logo. This is real-time data, as John mentioned, that’s being pulled from that rich database from SiliconExpert, that’s got hundreds of millions of components, all giving you information about lifecycle status, compliance, and so forth. Everything to the left of this blue bar, this is your Arena data. So, these are the items on your bill of materials that you’ve got under control in Arena. And so, when I click this lookup view, what I’m doing is I’m really mashing up two sets of data. I’ve got the Arena data over here and the SiliconExpert data over here matched up to the parts on my BOM. And so, I can see here, everywhere I have a little check mark that means that for this item, this diode, we searched the SiliconExpert database, found a match, and over here we’re presenting the results of that search.

And so, now, I get this really nice mashup view of my bill of materials. And really what’s going on with these parts in the context of all the different roles that John mentioned. What’s going on with market availability? What’s the lifecycle status of each part on the BOM? Are any of these parts at risk for going end of life? And then, how do I access things like the data sheet, the RoHS, or any of the environmental certificates of compliance that John mentioned earlier? And that’s really what this gives.

So, looking at this bill of materials a little bit more closely, if I look at this first part, this diode, I can see that I found a match and it shows me the matching part here that it pulled from the SiliconExpert database. And then, over here, I’m pulling … and, again, this is all coming from SiliconExpert. I’m getting a snapshot of what the market availability looks like today. And I can see there’s a lot in inventory. The part is active, it’s got a medium risk, and I’ll talk a little bit about these risk indicators in just a moment.

And then, over here, I can see that I have pulled information on the data sheet, the RoHS compliance, REACH, conflict minerals. And I can even get PCN information, so product change notification, that’s really important, especially as someone like a procurement person or an engineer who’s working on this particular assembly, if there’s a product change notification that was released, those roles really want to know that information, so they can make decisions early and soon as to whether or not they should keep this part in the design. If there’s a PCN, that’s telling me this part is going end of life soon, perhaps I want to do a change order, get this part off, replace it with a new, fresh part.

So, what I can do with this view is, very quickly, I’ll go to this risk column here and you can see we’ve got these risk indicators. And what this is telling me, this is telling me about the lifecycle risk of every part on the BOM. And what I really like about this is I can just quickly scroll down this BOM and see from a red, yellow, green perspective, where are my parts that are in good shape? Green is low risk. Yellow is medium, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that I need to take action, but maybe I want to go look at some more details and find out what’s going on with this part. And then, of course, red would tell me something like this is a high-risk part. And in fact, in this case, this part has gone obsolete. So, I probably want to take action and maybe replace this or remove it from my approved manufacturers list for this part.

And so, with this, I can just quickly scroll up and down this BOM. And you can see there are some items where I might say this BOM’s not very healthy, and I’m going to go take some action, and update some of these items. And, again, this could be for many of those roles that John described, whether it’s the design engineer who’s looking at maybe improving the design. Or maybe a procurement person who’s looking to do a large purchase or a large manufacturing build and they want to go through this view, scrub the BOM real quick, make sure I don’t have any parts that are high risk before I go and place a purchase order with my contract manufacturer.

So, on top of all that, what I can do is on any of these items over in these columns, anywhere you see a link, I can click and drill down into these specific items. And so, I’ll do that on this, a diode, here. So, I’ll just click on the link here. And what that does is that takes me to the supplier item view in Arena. And in the supplier item view, we also have a SiliconExpert lookup view. So, for any specific supplier item that you set up in Arena you can do a SiliconExpert search and, you can see up here, it’s telling me that it’s as matched to a single identified part in the SiliconExpert database. And everything below here is data I’m pulling from the SiliconExpert database to show you more detailed information about this part.

And so, I’ll just go through these sections here. So, the basic information section, I can see some of the information that I saw previously in the BOM view. So, I can see that there’s a lot in inventory right now out in distribution. It is an active part, and a lifecycle risk of medium, which is why it was yellow in that BOM view. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the part is bad. But what that really means, and if I go down here to the lifecycle, just, I’ll skip over this section real quick. But in the lifecycle, I can see in this risk section that it does have a medium lifecycle risk. It’s a mature part and it has an estimated end of life at six years. So, depending upon the product and the use of the product, I may need to take action, but otherwise this part looks pretty good.

In the documents section, I can see where I can access the data sheet, the online data sheet, and what this means is the data sheet is the data sheet that is stored in the SiliconExpert database. If I want to access the link directly to the manufacturer’s site, I can click the online supplier data sheet. So, either of those, clicking that will open a new tab and I can view the data sheet for that part. I can also see compliance information. So, there is a RoHS compliance certificate available that I can click, and also view or download. And I could do the same for the conflict, REACH, or the materials data sheet, which gives me more detailed information on all of the materials in that part.

Back to the lifecycle risk section, I can see different risk categories. So, you can see the first one, lifecycle risk, is telling me it’s medium. And, again, that’s because it’s a mature part. And we talked about the estimated EOL. And then, down below here, I can see different risks categories for multisource, meaning, are there a lot of cross references available? If there weren’t, if there were no crosses, or very few, I might see a medium or a high here. Same with inventory in RoHS. So, if the inventory out there, and distribution, if it’s low, or not available, this will toggle to something like medium or high, and same for RoHS. Down here in the inventory section, I can see all the different distributors who offer this part, what their estimated availability is. And then, I can even click and navigate to that site. In this one I’ll look at Digi-Key and I can see that part.

The next section is the crosses. And I can see, here, all the different crosses—it’s SiliconExpert’s telling me—that are compatible with this part of my bill of materials. And if there are any differences, this comment section will tell me. So, in this case, there are some slight differences in some of the temperature and other parametric data. But, for the most part, I can go through this and pick the crosses that I see that would be appropriate for this and maybe take action. Maybe I want to take one of these and add it as another approved source. And this section I really like, because the last thing you want is to have a part with one source. That’s trouble. If anything happens to that one approved source, you may have a line-down situation. Or cases where manufacturing’s coming back to engineering in a rush scenario trying to find a replacement. So, I want to be proactive. And I want to have as many approved sources ready to be purchased on my bill of materials as possible.

So, here I can go to this sources section, find available sources, and add them to my approved sources for this part. You can see there are a lot here. And then, finally, down here is a section showing me the latest product change notification. So, whatever the last PCN that was published by the manufacturer, I will see that here, I can link to the document, and I can also see some of the days. So, when the notification was sent, when this PCN is supposed to be made effective. If there were an obsolescence scenario, I could even see the last time by day and the last shift day, if that was appropriate.

All right, so, that’s everything we wanted to show you today. If you are interested in seeing more about this integration, you can always contact [email protected]. Or if SiliconExpert is new to you and you want to look into that a little bit more, you can contact [email protected]. So, John, thanks again for joining me today. And thank you all for watching.

John Mastropietro:

Thank you. Thank you for the excellent demo, Paul. Thank you for the presentation today, everyone.