What is Ciiva?
Ciiva is an electronic component management solutions company with three core products:
Online Electronic Component Search Engine (“Ciiva Online Search”)
The Online Search provides instant access to information including real time pricing and availability, second sources and lifecycle state for tens of millions of components. Documentation including datasheets and application notes can be accessed with single click, with direct links to supplier websites.
Collaborative Bill of Materials Management System (BMMS)
The Bill of Materials Management System (BMMS) is a real time collaborative software application designed specifically for organising and managing electronic component and bill of materials data. It enables multiple users to work in parallel and supports advanced features including version control. It is fully integrated with the Ciiva Online Search, seamlessly bringing together the component library and bill of materials with all other related information sources.
Component Data Application Programming Interface (API)
The Ciiva API provides programmatic access to the Ciiva Cloud Database. This is the same database which is used to power the Ciiva Electronic Component Search Engine at https://ciiva.com. It is also the same database which is integrated with the Ciiva Bill of Materials Management System (BMMS).
- What is the current lifecycle status of a component used on my product?
- Which products is a particular component deployed on?
- Which supplier has a particular component in stock and is the cheapest?
- Is there a second source available for a specific component?
- What is the difference between two bill of materials?
- What is the historical pricing and availability of a component?
- Who changed that, when did they change it, and what did they change?
Having instant access to information such as lifecycle status, potential alternatives, real-time and historical pricing and availability, “where used”, and “who, when and what changed” can help design engineers and procurement personnel make better decisions throughout the product lifecycle, from initial component selection in a design, to understanding the impact of an obsolescence notification.
Ciiva is a single source for all of this information and more, saving you hours of time scouring multiple sources, trying to find reliable information you need to make important decisions.
Many of today’s electronic devices contain a large number of components, from a variety of different manufacturers and suppliers. Changes to a BOM can happen at various stages throughout the lifecycle of a product, often without changing original hardware design data, such as schematics or layout. For many companies, this can involve an error prone manual change to a spreadsheet or document, with no record of who made the changes, when they were made or why they were made.
Ciiva provides a fully traceable, version controlled BOM management feature, where every component used in a BOM is linked to an access controlled, centralised component library.
Ciiva is a fully collaborative component management solution. This means it is designed to support multiple people working with the same central component library at the same time. Ciiva uses real-time data synchronisation between users to ensure that every user is always working with the latest, up to date component information, and that information fragmentation and de-centralisation does not occur.
Ciiva provides real-time pricing and availability information from a wide range of different suppliers allowing instant price and stock comparison. With the ability to automatically populate shopping carts, Ciiva can save you hours of time when it comes to purchasing.
You can now instantly determine what product or products a specific component is used on, making it extremely fast and easy to see what impact a change to a component, such as an obsolescence notification, may have on your products.
Updates can be made to the component library without affecting released BOMs, and the user can decide how, when and if to propagate component library changes back into a product BOM.
As no two companies are the same, neither is the information that they choose to store or the processes that they follow. Ciiva therefore provides the ability for users to customise their database by defining custom attributes and enumerations.
Ciiva is built around a Client-Server-Cloud architecture. A user or company database is created and securely stored on one of our many node servers, which is positioned in a geographically optimised location.
Each user has a Windows client application that runs locally on their PC which connects to the node server to synchronise data in real-time with other connected clients (authorised users). If a client is offline, changes are pushed to the client the next time a user logs in and it connects to the node server. Users can even access information offline in a read-only mode should it be required.
Installation of the client does not require any administrator privileges, and updates to the client software are made automatically, so users don’t have to worry about version updates. In this respect, it is as simple as using a web based application.
The Ciiva Cloud captures information from a wide range of manufacturers and suppliers in real-time and combines this information with historical data to provide live information feeds.
This is combined with anonymous, validated data harvested from the entire Ciiva user base to further enhance the information feeds. For example, a potential alternative component recommendation may be derived from supplier component information combined with anonymous data which indicates that a number of Ciiva users have also defined this component as a possible second source.
Your component and bill of materials information is safe and secure, and only shared with users that you choose to share it with. At no stage is any confidential user, component, product or bill or materials information provided to any other unauthorised Ciiva user. Statistical analysis of large amounts of anonymised data helps provide information that is beneficial to every Ciiva user while protecting data sources and respecting confidentiality. These statistical information sources are completely decoupled from and untraceable to an individual Ciiva user or database.
