Product change notifications for electronic component sourcing is a critical factor for both new and existing circuit boards designs.

When an electrical engineer is designing a new pcb and he places semiconductors, from capacitors, inductors, resistors and discrete semiconductors (Diodes, mosfets)  all the way to more programmable chips and embedded computers. Engineer needs to find materials that will be around for a while. So that this design will not be deferred due to part shortages or limited lifetime of a certain part. It will be Sent back to product design for re tooling of the bill of materials. 

When Vishay, Kemet or TDK decides to end a certain part number, it sometimes tells us what is the replacements, in that case your distributor should be able to find out and relatively quickly sync and make the bill of material valid and risk free once again.

But in cases there are no known alternatives this PCN means there is a need to find alternative supplier for a specific part in an existing design.

Pro active electronic distributors are the ones actively solving their clients problems 

That’s what’s called PCN lead generation, meaning a smart advanced distributor would quickly go to his clients with a valid alternative. This sounds futuristic? It is because the electronic component online world still don’t know how to find a resistor with higher or equal resistance. Because data is not normalized.

With recent developments coming mainly from new advanced online platforms, they managed to normalize the technical specification driving finally deep parametric search capabilities. The leader of this capability is sourcingBot.com, a relatively new online platform that offers range sliders for any critical parameter in passive components, connectors and more.

Speaking with Ran Oren, CEO and founder, “We wanted to run calculations and model calculations but found that the data online static and textual, even if it’s the resistance of a resistor. Without knowing we normalized the data and built mapping for packaging codes and other textual information. Only then we were able to really compare and build models for part cross referencing.”

SourcingBot today provides a conclusive API of part information that encapsulates all of that, you get technical parameters you can easily filter by. Second, you receive PCN as a notifications according to BOMs you uploaded. Eventually, you also receive cross references for those parts, if they have a PCN or not.

This alerting system is crucial for continuous product development, especially in lead time crunch phase of corona and looming trade war, we need better streamed data.

API that involves technical specification, PCN, lifecycle changes, stock and availability and cross refences all in 1 data stream 

If before corona, PCNs were the main issue, today it’s another layer for a constrained supply chain that is struggling to answer normal lead times.  

Today companies can consume the data and internally manage requests, shortages and provide enough time to adjust from when the PCN is declared until a new batch of this electronic device needs to be manufactured again