Electronic component sourcing and BOM kitting

A bill of materials looks innocent: a few dozen lines, part numbers, quantities. In practice it is a few dozen separate purchasing decisions, delivery dates and risks that one part with a six-week lead time will hold up the whole series. At Convel we take BOM kitting on ourselves. Thanks to years of cooperation with distributors we supply the full range of components, including parts from niche manufacturers and hard-to-get components, and our ERP system links every batch of parts with the boards it was fitted to.

Two models of cooperation

We match them to the project, not the other way round.

• Full kitting by Convel. You send us the BOM, we order all the components, take them into the warehouse, inspect them and issue them to production. You settle one invoice for finished boards or devices. This is the model chosen by most customers who want production off their mind.
• Consigned components. You supply some or all of the parts, for example devices bought under your own framework agreements, and we make up the rest. We keep separate records for them and account for their consumption.

The models can be combined: part of the BOM from you, part from us. What matters is agreeing it at the quotation stage, because delivery planning and the start date depend on it.

Hard-to-get parts and alternatives

In recent years the component market has been through everything: shortages, allocations, lead times of many months, and then oversupply. That taught us two things. First, it is worth having more than one distributor and relationships that make it possible to obtain niche parts when the official channel says “not available”. Second, before production is started it is worth checking which BOM lines are risky and having approved alternatives for them. We do this during the documentation review: we point out components with long lead times and parts going end of life, and propose alternatives that the customer approves before the start, rather than in a panic in the middle of a series.

Inspection and storage

Every component delivery goes through incoming inspection: conformity with the order, markings, condition of the packaging, dates. Components are taken into the warehouse with the supplier’s batch number, and from that moment the ERP system tracks their route all the way to a specific batch of boards. If a manufacturer withdraws a batch of a device, within minutes we know which units it went into.

Components and the cost of production

The price of the parts is usually the largest item in the cost of a device, larger than the assembly itself. That is why optimising the BOM genuinely matters: standardising the values of passive parts, choosing packages suited to automatic placement, selecting components available from several sources instead of one. Buying for many projects at once, we also get better terms from distributors than a single customer ordering a few hundred pieces. Those savings are visible in the quotation.

Together with boards and logistics

Component kitting works best combined with PCB manufacturing and storage and delivery planning: then one schedule covers the boards, the parts and the production capacity, and you get a date that takes everything into account, not just the assembly time.

Frequently asked questions about components