HEN Technologies · Product lifecycle management
BOM Manager — custom PLM
A PLM we built instead of bought.
The problem
Product data lived across MRPeasy, Google Sheets and build plans, and nothing answered what was actually in the product. Buying a PLM meant a licence, an integration project and a months-long rollout — slower than the problem it solved.
Why build it
The off-the-shelf PLM quoted $2,000 per user per year for read/write. Thirty hardware engineers needed it on day one, with the team planned to grow by half again the next year — before supply chain and outside suppliers, who need the same data at $500 per user per year read-only. That is $115,000 a year, or $345,000 over three.
| Seats | Off-the-shelf PLM | Built in-house |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering — read/write · 50 seats | 50 × $2,000 = $100,000 | Included |
| Supply chain & suppliers — read-only · 30 seats | 30 × $500 = $15,000 | Included |
| Per year | $115,000 | $0 |
| Over three years | $345,000 | $0 |
The deeper argument
Per-seat pricing charges you for the one thing a PLM is supposed to do — put everyone on the same data. Every supplier, buyer and engineer you add makes the single source of truth more valuable and more expensive at once. That pressure pushes people back into spreadsheets, which is the exact problem you bought the system to solve. Building it removed the meter.
What it does
Multi-level BOMs with cost rolling up through subassemblies; a 27-family part taxonomy; landed COGS that adds freight, tariffs, overhead and packaging to material cost; immutable revisions with a WIP → In Review → Released approval chain and a lock; and importers that read indented CSVs from mechanical CAD and Altium/KiCad exports rather than a vendor API.
Where it goes next
Engineering change management — ECRs and ECOs through the same approval chain, so a change, its cost impact and its release become one traceable thread.