In this video I walk you through how I manage a real, production-grade bill of materials like a senior engineer—because in industry the PCB being “done” is not the finish line. The biggest thing that holds up fab and assembly is parts: supply chain, availability, lifecycle status, alternates, and procurement constraints. I use the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin carrier board BOM as the example (1500+ lines), because that’s exactly the kind of BOM where Excel breaks down and starts costing you days. I show why a BOM management tool beats Excel for hardware design: it pulls real-world supplier data, totals pricing automatically, surfaces datasheets instantly, and flags issues with clear indicators (green check marks, warnings, lifecycle notes like “not recommended for new designs”). I also show how I evaluate and clean up alternates—deleting bad alternates, validating “true” alternates when parameters differ, and using trends/usage signals to judge viability. Finally, I touch on the enterprise reality: approved suppliers, distributor preferences, and procurement rules that can make or break a release if you don’t catch them early (like minimum order quantities).