How Intelligent Platforms Are Finally Simplifying BOM Management for Modern OEMs

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For decades, BOM management has been one of the least glamorous yet most critical parts of building electronic products. No matter how innovative the design, how powerful the firmware, or how sleek the packaging, every hardware team eventually meets the same immovable bottleneck: sourcing thousands of components efficiently, accurately, and at scale.

And for just as long, the tools used to manage this process haven’t kept pace. Engineers still juggle spreadsheets. Procurement teams manually chase quotes from dozens of suppliers. EMS providers wrestle with siloed systems that leave them re-entering data again and again. Even with powerful discovery platforms like Octopart, the final stretch of turning a design into a purchasable, manufacturable bill of materials often happens in spreadsheets, emails, and tribal workflows.

But the barriers between engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing are finally coming down. A new generation of intelligent, cloud-based platforms is shifting the focus from "searching for parts" to actually sourcing them efficiently. These tools are transforming BOM workflows by automating scrubbing, pricing, supplier allocation, RFQs, and compliance checks—eliminating manual steps that used to take hours or days.

To understand how this shift is unfolding, the Ontrack Podcast with Zach Peterson sat down with Nemanja Jokanovic, VP and GM at Breadboard, whose team is building one of the most rapidly adopted intelligent BOM platforms in the EMS ecosystem. What he shared reveals an industry on the brink of a major inflection point—one driven by speed, automation, and real-world usability.

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From Spreadsheets to Speed: Why the Legacy Workflow Is Breaking Down

For many engineers and buyers, the BOM experience hasn’t changed in 20 years. You export your parts list. You clean up inconsistencies. You look up prices manually. You send RFQs. You cross-check approvals. You repeat this for every quantity break and every customer variant.

“It’s a very traditional norm that there’s a segregation between the engineer and the procurement officer,” Jokanovic explains. The former focuses on performance; the latter on price, supply, and risk. But the tools that connected these two worlds were not built for collaboration—they were built for recordkeeping.

PLM, ERP, and MRP systems perform critical roles, but they are general-purpose by design. Their job is not to scrub a messy BOM, extract alternates from a PDF drawing, or intelligently prioritize suppliers based on pre-negotiated pricing.

And that gap becomes painfully clear during quoting cycles.

Speed wins business. EMS teams know it. OEMs know it. And in the U.S. market especially, “the first one to release a fully costed BOM back to their OEM partners is often the one winning the business,” Jokanovic says. But no traditional tool is built for fast, iterative, sourcing-centric BOM work.

That’s where intelligent BOM platforms are stepping in.

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A New Class of Platform Focused Entirely on BOM-to-Buy Workflows

Modern BOM platforms like Breadboard aren’t trying to be PLMs. They aren’t trying to be design tools. Instead, they focus obsessively on the sourcing workflow: cleaning, costing, allocating, quoting, and preparing a BOM for actual procurement.

“It’s really evolving from a search function into: this is for buying,” Jokanovic says.

These systems bring together:

• Automated BOM scrubbing
  Intelligent mapping, delimiter cleaning, and manufacturer pairing—often with machine learning that handles inconsistencies normally fixed by hand.
• Real-time pricing from 200+ distributors
  Not just search results, but logged-in, custom-negotiated pricing.
• Supplier preference logic (AVL-aware)
  Tiered vendor lists, ITAR restrictions, specialty suppliers, and customer-specific profiles.
• Batch quantity costing
  Prototype, mid-volume, and full-scale builds priced simultaneously across multiple quantity breaks.
• Compliance flags
  RoHS, REACH, and lifecycle risk indicators built into the quoting view.
• Automated RFQs with follow-up sequences
  Prebuilt templates, multi-supplier sequencing, and automated reminders.
• Customizable exports that mirror ERP import formats
  So the final output can flow directly into purchasing workflows with no reformatting.

The goal isn’t to replace ERP—it’s to deliver a fully costed, scrubbed, ready-to-procure BOM that slots directly into the ERP with zero friction.

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Machine Learning Steps In: Extracting BOMs from PDFs, Even for Cable Assemblies

One of the least discussed bottlenecks in manufacturing is the complexity of cable assemblies and wiring harnesses. Unlike PCBAs—where part numbers dominate—cable assemblies often come as PDFs: multi-page diagrams, drawings, tables, gauges, and lengths.

Breadboard built something few platforms tackle: a machine-learning-powered PDF extractor specifically tuned for these drawings.

The system identifies tables, pulls structured data out of them, extracts component requirements (“10 pieces of this connector,” “6 feet of this wire”), and turns the entire cable assembly into a clean, importable BOM in seconds.

“I haven’t seen anything like that before,” Jokanovic says. For many EMS and harness shops, this capability alone eliminates hours of manual transcription per project.

And it reflects a wider pattern: intelligent BOM platforms aren’t just digitizing old workflows—they are rewriting them.

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Bringing Designers and Procurement Together—Finally

One of the most powerful shifts in this new generation of BOM tools is the unification of engineering and sourcing perspectives.

Traditionally:

• Engineers think in function, performance, parameters.
• Buyers think in cost, availability, compliance.

These two worlds often interact only when something breaks—when stock runs out, when a part goes end-of-life, or when an engineer’s ideal component is unobtainable in volume.

Intelligent BOM tools give both sides a shared interface, where:

• Alternates can be proposed and evaluated side-by-side.
• Lifecycle risk is visible immediately.
• Compliance issues surface early.
• Buyers and engineers collaborate on exceptions rather than entire BOMs.

The platform handles 80–90% of the “normal” parts automatically. Humans focus on the abnormalities: specialty components, custom parts, long-lead items, and cost drivers.

“That’s where people should spend their time,” Jokanovic insists—not on cleaning spreadsheets.

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Auto-Allocation: Turning Thousands of Data Points into One Click

At the heart of Breadboard’s workflow is a feature that redefines the meaning of "fast BOM costing": Auto Allocate.

With one click, the system:

• Applies supplier tiering preferences
• Chooses best-fit pricing at each quantity break
• Factors in custom partner pricing
• Honors AVL rules
• Accounts for packaging types (e.g., full reel vs. cut tape)
• Prioritizes stock or price, depending on the strategy
• Adjusts distributors per batch quantity

Within seconds, a complete, pricing-optimized BOM is ready for review.

For an EMS team, this is transformative. Traditionally, a sourcing manager must open every line, compare multiple distributors, track packaging differences, and manually assign suppliers across different build quantities.

Auto-allocation turns an hour-long task into a few seconds—without sacrificing traceability or control.

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RFQs Without the Email Chaos

RFQs have historically been a painful bottleneck. Every EMS buyer has the same inbox story: dozens of distributors, inconsistent quote formats, missed follow-ups, and hours spent re-entering pricing.

Breadboard replaces this chaos with:

• Automated email sequences
• Distributor-specific templates
• Attachments pre-populated with cleaned BOM data
• Multi-batch quantity requests in a single submission
• “Pending,” “Received,” and “Approved” quote states
• One-click application of received pricing back into the BOM

When a supplier responds, the buyer simply approves the bid, and the data flows back into the project instantly.

This mirrors the insight behind the Breadboard platform: automation for the routine tasks, human judgment for the exceptions.

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Customizable Exports That Match How OEMs Actually Work

Once the BOM is ready, the final output is where most tools break down. A spreadsheet export is never “just a spreadsheet”—every EMS and OEM has its own format, its own cost lines, its own column ordering, its own ERP import requirements.

That’s why the most universally loved feature among Breadboard users might be the export engine.

Teams can:

• Build multiple export templates
• Match ERP import formats exactly
• Add cost lines for labor, tooling, machining
• Include tariff calculations and country-of-origin data
• Create customer-facing quote formats
• Include summaries (SMT vs. through-hole, distributor totals, etc.)

As Jokanovic puts it, “Our job is to take BOMs from messy to manufacturable.” Export templates close the loop by producing an ERP-ready, customer-ready artifact every time.

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Towards a Full Supply Chain Management System

Where is this all heading?

Jokanovic is clear: the platform is evolving.

“We want to become a supply chain management system,” he says—a full evolution from platform to system. The roadmap includes automated purchasing flows, order APIs, and tighter integrations that bridge quoting to actual procurement.

In other words: the BOM doesn't stop at costing; it becomes the foundation for automated buying.

This is the same shift that reshaped software engineering—moving from manual builds to continuous integration and deployment. Hardware is undergoing a similar transformation, except instead of code builds, it's the BOM-to-buy workflow being automated.

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The Takeaway: Intelligent BOM Tools Are Becoming the New Source of Truth

The electronics industry has always relied on a fragmented stack of tools—CAD for design, PLM for documentation, ERP for purchasing. BOM workflows have slipped through the cracks because none of these systems were built specifically for them.

Intelligent BOM platforms are filling that gap.

They are:

• Fast
• Collaborative
• Supplier-aware
• Manufacturing-ready
• Built for real procurement workflows
• And already replacing large portions of the traditional quoting process

For EMS providers, OEMs, and cable assembly houses, these platforms are becoming the first tool opened in the morning—“the source of truth,” as Jokanovic describes the trend.

The BOM, once a static document, is finally becoming dynamic, intelligent, and automated.

In a world where supply chain volatility, component shortages, and tight customer deadlines are the new normal, this shift couldn’t come at a better time.

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