Where each tool fits

ECAD draws, ERP buys. What about the bit in between?

Almost every hardware team has the two ends covered. What nobody owns is the middle: what the product contains, in which version, with which documentation, and what was approved. That middle usually ends up in shared folders and in the heads of two or three people.

This page compares categories of tool, not specific products. There is no winner: the three do different things and live together.

The three, side by side

Electronic design tool

What it does: Draws the schematic, routes the board and generates the manufacturing files.
What it holds: The design project in its own format, with its libraries.
The question it answers: “What does this circuit look like?”
Where it stops short: It knows the design that is open, not the whole product nor what was approved for manufacturing.

XKEMA

What it does: Holds the product structure, its bills of materials, its engineering tables and its documentation, and versions them.
What it holds: Equipment, boards, PCBs and stackups; BOMs tied to their element; PDF, Gerber, drill files, models and library.
The question it answers: “What did the unit that was built contain, and who approved it?”
Where it stops short: It does not design, does not buy and does not manufacture. It does not open the ECAD's native project either.

Enterprise management system

What it does: Buys, plans, manufactures, invoices and keeps the inventory.
What it holds: Items, suppliers, orders, costs and warehouse movements.
The question it answers: “What has to be bought, when and at what price?”
Where it stops short: It treats the product as a list of items. The schematic, the stackup and the reason for a change are not its data.

How it actually goes

Where XKEMA comes in day to day

The design is done where it has always been done. What comes out of it —schematics, Gerbers, drill files, the bill of materials— stops landing in a folder and starts hanging from the element of the product it belongs to.

When that revision is approved, it is frozen. And what the ERP needs in order to buy comes from a bill of materials that does say which revision of which board it belongs to.

Design in the tool you already use
Structure and documentation tied to the product
Review and approval the version is frozen
Purchasing and manufacturing in your management system
Redesign, years later when you need to know what was there

What if we already have a document manager?

A document manager stores files and controls who sees them. What it does not know is that this PDF is the schematic of the board that goes inside that equipment, or that the bill of materials next to it belongs to a different revision.

The difference is not where the file is: it is whether the system understands what it is.

Do we have to stop using something?

No. XKEMA replaces neither the design tool nor the management system: it fills the gap that neither of them covers. If a shared folder covers that gap today, that is what it replaces.

Signs that the gap is yours

The revision lives in the file name

And there are two files with the same name and a different suffix in two different folders.

Asking what was manufactured costs half a morning

And the answer comes from piecing together an email, a folder and somebody's memory.

The same component written three different ways

Every BOM types it its own way, so nothing can be cross-checked between them.

Nobody can say who approved that revision

The approval happened, but it lived in an email thread that can no longer be found.

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