API Spotlight: Aligni - Cloud-Based PLM and MRP
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

(This is a guest blog by Jake Janovetz, CEO and founder of Aligni.)

Aligni Executive Summary Aligni is a cloud-based application for product lifecycle and manufacturing management. You can think of Aligni as a fluid integration of PLM (product lifecycle management) and MRP (materials resource planning) software. Because these two realms are fully integrated in Aligni by design, there is no need for the complicated set of processes, spreadsheets, and ad-hoc tools that are often used to interface them.

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Aligni manages a part's lifecycle from initial data entry to consumption, including vendor quoting, vendor purchasing, receipt into inventory, transfers, build kitting, and consumption into finished goods. Independent PLM and MRP tools leave large gaps in this lifecycle and require significant human effort to bring fill these gaps. Background Working with several small companies, contractors, and consultants, we recognized a need for part management. Many small companies were using spreadsheets to track parts and project BOMs. This gets out of hand very quickly, but you'd be amazed by how many companies do this! In the past, tools such as Parts & Vendors have sufficed, but it is a desktop application and poorly suited to the internet world we live in now. Other tools are available but are very expensive and few offer full PLM and MRP functionality, so you need to shop for even more tools, then dedicate resources to integrating them.  

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So Aligni was initially born to eliminate the backward reliance on spreadsheets for part and inventory management. But with the productivity gains already apparent, it quickly grew to become a single-source application. Customers wanted to get quotes from vendor inside sales folks (like Avnet, Arrow, etc) from within Aligni. Our ActiveQuote feature was created to fill this need and it quickly moved quotes from the email realm to direct Aligni interaction saving tons of time for both our customers and their vendors. Purchasing and more complete build management came next along with extensive reporting capabilities. Now, many customers keep their Aligni web pages up all day next to their email applications. It's the go-to application for anything involving their product design or build schedule.

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Aligni currently uses Octopart's API to help customers pull price quotes and vendor part numbers from catalog vendors to fill out their database. Having this information readily available through the Aligni interface saves customers tons of time and allows them to remain within a single application rather than shuffling between browser tabs or windows. We have lots more planned for our customers and Octopart API integration!Octopart API Usage

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