Hi everyone, I'm currently a System Engineer at a tech firm in Taiwan. My role covers a broad range of responsibilities, including mechanical, electronic, and software requirements, regulatory compliance, test process design, test software development, and documentation. In the local industry here, requirements management is a real challenge. Traditional PLM and requirements tools cost $5k-15k per seat—completely out of reach for small to mid-sized teams. On the other hand, software-centric tools like Jira don't always feel like a natural fit for tracking part-specific hardware requirements. Currently, Excel is my only tool, but it's becoming a nightmare for traceability. It's incredibly difficult to track how a change in a part's design impacts testing, DFMEA, or regulatory compliance—and whether we need to re-run specific tests. To solve this, I'm developing a Requirements Management System built around the BOM. The goal is to provide an affordable solution for hardware engineers by using the assembly tree as the starting point. By linking requirements and test cases directly to components, we can catch integration issues early rather than discovering them during the final prototype stage. What are your thoughts on this BOM-based approach? I'd love to hear any perspectives, experiences, or potential pitfalls you might see. Thanks in advance! P.S. I've built a prototype at https://nilmiss.com (free to try). Still very early stage, but the BOM-centric structure is working well for our EV project. I'd be super grateful if any of you want to give it a spin. I'm really just trying to validate if this solves a genuine industry pain point or if it's just a specific quirk of my own team's workflow.

NIL-MISS

Requirements management made simple for hardware teams

Requirements management made simple for hardware teams