Electronics manufacturer reduces request for quote response time for printed circuit board assemblies

Improving RFQ response time

Headquartered in Pretoria, Omnigo is a leading South African electronics contract manufacturer (ECM), providing printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA) and turnkey project services to a variety of customers in the telecom, mining and defense sectors.

Well-known for the precision performance and accuracy of its products, Omnigo was looking for ways to improve its request for quote (RFQ) response times. “We have always used a manual, spreadsheet-based process for providing quotes,” says Marius Nel, director of operations for Omnigo. “It worked well, but with the advent of Covid and the turmoil it created in the electronic component market, we realized that we needed to look at alternative methods to become nimbler and adapt to an ever-changing environment.

“We imported our clients’ bill-of-materials into spreadsheets and sent e-mail requests to our suppliers. Once all the responses were received from our suppliers, we consolidated them into a master spreadsheet. Components would then be manually selected according to cost and/or lead time considerations, and a quote would then be sent to the client. Once an order was received from a client, it went through a ’scrubbing’ process to validate the information and import the BOM into our ERP system.”

Due to the manual nature of the quotation process, turnaround times were long. There were also technical and cost calculation gaps due to the fact that validation of the bill-of-materials (BOM) would only take place once an order was received.

“So we began to search for a solution that would improve both quotation turnaround times and accuracy. Siemens’ Valor BOM Connector was the best fit,” says Nel.

Directly importing quotes from suppliers

With the help of ASIC Design Services, Siemens Digital Industry Software’s strategic partner in South Africa, and Circuit Byte, the original developer of BOM Connector (now Valor™ BOM Connector software), the Siemens solution became available in 2021. “With Valor BOM Connector, materials data can be imported directly into the platform and information is validated immediately, improving performance and accuracy. With Valor BOM Connector, quotes can be imported directly through supplier APIs.”

“Once an order is received from a client, we simply export the relevant information from Valor BOM Connector and import it directly into our ERP system.”

Enhancing turnaround time and accuracy

By leveraging the speed and flexibility of Valor BOM Connector, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services, Omnigo has improved both its quotation turnaround time and accuracy.

“We’ve reduced our average RFQ turnaround time,” says Nel. “Much of the improvement is due to our ability to instantly process supplier quotations.

“The training sessions provided by Siemens and ASIC Design Services were quite useful – and they allowed us to record the sessions for future reference.

“We have seen significant overall improvements in our RFQ responses and firmly believe that Valor BOM Connector is the best choice for optimizing quotation performance.”

Future plans

“We are currently looking to integrate Valor BOM Connector and the manufacturing data used in our SMT processes with the Valor Process Preparation software and Valor Parts Library offered by Siemens,” says Nel.