Today marked the launch of a new player in the world of product data management. Aligni Inc., which focuses on parts management software for predominantly small product design companies, emerged from beta into the competitive terrain of parts and inventory management software this week.

Unlike service parts management firms such as Servigistics and MCA Solutions, which focus on managing parts for post-sales service, Aligni targets the initial product design phase, when engineers can save time and money by having accurate parts information at their fingertips.

Founder and CEO Jake Janovetz told Managing Automation that the company has logged fewer than a dozen customers to date, most of which hail from the printed circuit board/electronics arena.

Central to Aligni’s Web-based software is a parts and components management engine that allows product design teams to organize information on the parts they use during the design process, as well as the inventory levels of those parts.

“We’re trying to get engineers to use available parts that are already in the database and see that up-front when they start a design,” Janovetz explained. He said Aligni’s eponymous offering uses a Web-based database to replace a number of more manual parts management techniques, including Excel spreadsheets or Access databases, BOMs that are saved in simple file formats such as Word or PDF, and spreadsheets of vendor quotes that must be continually updated.

Aligni includes a Web-based database that can store as many as 10,000 parts and their associated data, depending on a customer’s subscription level. That information can include a laundry list of details, such as product name, type, manufacturer, RoHS compliance, tolerance percentage, packaging type, and other customized details.

Aligni’s interface also allows users to maintain a library of associated files and notes (CAD drawings, programming files, etc.), price quotes, vendor part numbers, lists of approved vendors, and alternate parts that can be used — from perfect fits to those that might need some engineering to suit the project at hand.

The software also catalogs prior uses of parts in the database, allowing a user to see at a glance what parts were used on which projects. Such information can be valuable to a design engineer, who can get advice from a project team that has used a given part, and to a procurement person, who can extrapolate future purchasing needs from the historical data, Janovetz said.

For more complex design projects, Aligni’s Projects and Assemblies feature allows designers to keep track of assembly hierarchies by storing BOMs for all of a project’s parts and subassemblies.

Janovetz said the inclusion of inventory management — in particular, multi-site inventory management that can track parts as they come in the door, move from a contract manufacturer to the OEM, and get consumed during a project build — sets Aligni apart from a number of its competitors, a field that includes product and inventory management vendors such as Arena Solutions, Trilogy Design, and Supply Frame’s QuoteFX.

For mid-level and larger accounts, Aligni offers ActiveQuote, which lets users communicate directly with vendors to get part costs and add them to the Aligni database. To use ActiveQuote, an engineer adds the needed parts to a request for quote (RFQ) similar to adding items to an online shopping cart. The Aligni system then distributes the RFQ and returns its results to the user as a cost sheet detailing the vendors’ costs at various quantities.

Monthly pricing for the Aligni product suite ranges from $15 (€9.4) for one user managing a maximum of 400 parts to $199 (€125) for an unlimited number of users managing as many as 10,000 parts. Medium-sized design teams can manage 1,500 parts for $79 (€49.6), while larger teams can manage 3,000 for $99 (€62) — both with unlimited users.

Most of Aligni’s customers will be small design shops, Janovetz said, noting that the company’s two announced customers, Jova Solutions and Viscell Inc., employ 10 and seven people, respectively.

Online senior editor Diane Himes contributed to the reporting of this story.