Inspiration
Our experience working with large manufacturing companies showed us how easily teams can lose alignment on a bill of materials (BOM). Engineering, procurement, and manufacturing each work in their own tools, and their versions of the BOM can drift apart.
Conversations with Kearney mentors at the hackathon reinforced the problem. They described these same issues causing three weeks of delays. That led us to a foundational question: before connecting a BOM to spending data, how do you establish which BOM to trust?
What it does
CSOT, our Centralized Source of Truth, is designed to work in the background beneath the tools teams already use. It consolidates BOM changes and version history into a shared, traceable record.
When discrepancies appear, CSOT flags them and brings the relevant owners into a shared channel to resolve them. This captures context that might otherwise stay buried in a spreadsheet or exist only in one person’s head. CSOT then records the decision and its reasoning so teams can reference it when similar issues arise.
The goal is an accurate BOM at every point in time, giving manufacturers a reliable foundation for connecting spending data and performing further analysis.
How we built it
We started with first principles and spent much of the hackathon designing the architecture around the problems real engineering, procurement, and manufacturing teams face.
We mapped how BOMs diverge across teams, where automated reconciliation can help, and where human judgment is essential. That shaped our approach: combine background data aggregation with a workflow that brings the right people together when information conflicts.
Challenges we ran into
Manufacturing workflows vary widely, and important information often depends on individual naming conventions or undocumented decisions. A discrepancy can be easy to detect but difficult to interpret without the person who created it.
Our challenge was designing a simple way to capture that context while fitting into existing workflows. We also had to decide where automation should stop and the people responsible for the BOM should take over.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of the vision and architecture we developed around a concrete industry problem. We traced the difficulty of connecting BOMs to spending data back to a more fundamental issue: teams need a shared, trustworthy BOM first.
We also designed a process that preserves the reasoning behind each resolution, making those decisions useful beyond a single conversation.
What we learned
Talking to people who have faced the problem changed how we defined our solution. We learned to question the starting assumptions and understand what makes the task difficult in practice.
We also learned that resolving conflicting data requires human context. Capturing that context is essential to building a source of truth people can trust.
What's next for CSOT - Centralized Source of Truth
- Connect BOMs to business data: Link the reconciled BOM to spend cubes, supplier contracts, and warranty data to support forecasting and analysis.
- Help engineers prevent repeat conflicts: Build a Grammarly-style assistant that uses archived decisions and BOM history to suggest corrections while engineers create or edit BOMs.
