Jova Solutions is a San Francisco-based engineering test equipment development firm with a distributed team of engineers, support staff and contractors located across the US. Rapid growth, high demand for its products and scarce resources spurred Jova to search for a collaborative tool to help them easily share product and parts information across their internal and external teams and to decrease tedious, wasted time spent on managing its parts and vendors.

The Challenge

Tracking parts and components using old fashioned "cheapy" client-based parts management software, Excel spreadsheets, and hand-written notes was difficult and time consuming. Jova products use several hundred parts across two product lines.

Parts ordering was a nightmare, an essentially manual task that could take days. Each buy required counting inventory, making separate buy lists by vendor, sending out RFQs, and waiting for replies.

The old-fashioned, client-based software was a stand alone product, useful to just the one person who had it on his computer. No one else could see the information. With Jova's geographically distributed team, tracking of parts and components and inventory management was growing increasingly unwieldy and taking much too much time.

The Solution

Jova selected Aligni to track and manage all of the parts and components that it uses on all of its test products. Going forward they will also use Aligni for purchasing.

Aligni's on-demand parts management database allows Jova to share part, component, assembly, sub-assembly, bill of materials (BOM), design information, vendor databases, approved vendor lists (AVL), and contact information anytime and from anywhere. This provides much better control over, and much better visibility into, part and component information and inventory levels.

The Results

"Aligni has dramatically decreased the time Jova spends buying and managing parts. We estimate this at 30 hours saved per buy. We buy 12 times a year so that's 360 hours - a very significant improvement at a very modest price."

"Aligni enables essential collaboration that allows us to share parts, parts databases, engineering documentation, even 3-D models. This improves our product's fitness for purpose and manufacturability. With Aligni, Jova integrates the entire ecosystem for our test products. This includes vendors, outsourced manufacturers, our partners and our customers."

"We really like that Aligni is Web hosted - Web-based is wonderful. We pay by the month and were able to try Aligni software for free."

"With Aligni's API we are able to integrate its functionality into our internal portal. This is significantly expanding our visibility into the entire ordering, building and shipping process."