Build From the Released Design 

"Altium is really the central point of our interface with PCB Manufacturing and EMS. We are using the sharing options to securely transfer the information to our partners. With that, they can look at the various versions and be sure that they are accessing the latest files. They can also comment on those and let us know if there is something that is not easy to manufacture or if there are any problems."

“If it’s gone through the workflows, you can see if it’s in the review state and ready to be produced, or in the draft state, and it’s a nice double-check before we build something.”

“You can’t just exchange data over spreadsheets. You make mistakes. You send them the wrong version of a spreadsheet. They go off and build something that has the wrong value component in it. Next thing you know, you’ve got 5 prototypes that you have to rework by hand to fix a problem, because they don’t have access to the latest and greatest data.”

“If ECAD is a silo and PLM is the source of truth for the product record, but all you have is the placeholder number in PLM, you don’t know what’s in it. How do we manufacture it? Having that full definition in one place that everyone understands and agrees is the source of truth for enterprise change management. It makes a huge difference.”

“It’s really nice to be able to say this version is a release. And I can say this version of the release went to this order number and this PCB manufacturer. And then you can open up Altium and download the Gerber files as a zip file, just by itself, and just send it directly to the people.”

"We have production people who have access to the designs and whenever they do development or they do assembly and they find something that's not working quite well, they have the chance to look at the designs and suddenly they don't come to me with problems.”