The EquatorOps Platform is where your team, your contract manufacturer and your quality consultant coordinate the work between companies. Parts and bills of material, sourcing, suppliers, change control, inventory and quality evidence connect through one approved cross-company record instead of being reconciled across five systems and two companies. Each party retains its private commercial and proprietary records.
Shared where the work crosses the boundary. Private where it does not.
If you design a product and someone else builds it, you are running a single program across at least two companies. Almost every tool in the stack assumes otherwise. Each one was built for a company that designs and manufactures under one roof, so the moment the factory is a separate legal entity in a separate time zone, the same part number ends up described in several places at once.
None of these is a bad system. The problem is the space between them. Every handoff is a re-keying, every re-keying is a chance for the two accounts to diverge, and the divergence is invisible until a change goes wrong or an auditor asks a question that spans two of the boxes.
The EquatorOps Platform closes the space between the companies without pretending the companies are the same company.
Both parties work from one approved cross-company record, while each retains private commercial, supplier, pricing, forecast and proprietary process data in its own controlled workspace. Shared records no longer need to be re-keyed or reconciled, and private records are not exposed merely because they relate to the same product. There is no repeated export, re-key and reconciliation cycle for the records designated as shared.
Shared where the work crosses the boundary. Private where it does not.
Modules are configured to the engagement. Most programs start with one and add the others as the working relationship with the factory deepens.
Quality & compliance
Controlled shared documents, the agreed design interface, change review, nonconformances, CAPA, management review, electronic signature and audit evidence across the specification owner and manufacturer. Each party's private design, commercial and process files remain controlled separately. Built for QMSR and ISO 13485 programs where the companies hold different parts of the obligation.
See the quality moduleParts & structure
Multi-level bills of material with revision history, approved manufacturer parts, where-used lookup in both directions, and a health view that surfaces the unresolved lines before they reach a buyer: missing approvals, single-sourced criticals, and parts whose real status has quietly changed.
Sourcing
Requests for quote issued against real BOM lines rather than a pasted spreadsheet, responses captured as structured data, and cost estimated at the assembly level so a sourcing choice can be compared against the product it lands in instead of against last quarter's price file. Internal purchase costs, yield reserves and margin structures remain private unless the parties have chosen an open-book commercial model. The shared record controls the quote, assumptions, accepted price and effective terms.
Suppliers
One shared approved-source view for the engagement, linked to each party's private supplier and commercial records. The shared view carries approval and compliance status, the decisions behind that status, performance evidence, readiness assessments, and a reassessment queue that shows which approvals are aging out.
Change
Multi-party change review with assigned approvals. The platform identifies potentially affected assemblies, approved sources, open orders and pending changes before anyone signs; named people review the sources, data gaps and rationale before approving the decision.
Production
Share the lots, quantities, effectivity, work-order state and inventory exposure needed to govern the program, without exposing unrelated customers, capacity allocations or private factory economics. A purge requirement or a build that consumed a superseded revision becomes a governed program fact.
The EquatorOps Platform can be authoritative for cross-company approvals and evidence while each company retains its internal ERP, PLM, QMS and financial systems. Records designated as shared can integrate with or publish to those systems; supplier participants receive task-focused access without having to migrate the factory's ERP.
This is a boundary system, not an automatic rip-and-replace.
The implementation defines which system is authoritative for each record, which approved data crosses the company boundary, and which data remains controlled entirely inside one party's workspace.
The modules above are not separate applications that exchange files on a schedule. They are views of the same shared program objects. A part is the same approved part whether you meet it in a bill of material, a quote, an inventory exposure, a change proposal or a design file. The shared approved-source view stays linked to each party's private supplier and commercial records without turning those private records into common data.
That is what makes a question like this answerable in one place: we want to substitute this connector, so what does it touch? A suite of integrated products answers that with a meeting. One record answers it with the list: the assemblies affected, the supplier that has to be requalified, the work orders already in flight, the inventory that becomes obsolete, and the quality documents that have to be revised before the change can close.
The value compounds rather than resetting.
A program managed in the EquatorOps Platform for a year holds its own history: why this manufacturer was approved, what the last three changes actually changed, which accepted price and terms took effect, which approved source slipped and when, and what was current the day a lot shipped. That is the record you want when a new engineer inherits the product, when the factory proposes a substitution, and when an auditor asks about something that happened before anyone in the room was involved.
Almost always with quality, because that is where the deadline is. A regulatory date, an audit notice, a customer questionnaire or a transfer to a new factory creates a reason to fix the evidence problem now, and the quality module is the one that carries that weight. The parts, supplier and change modules then tend to follow, because once the evidence is in one place the reconciliation cost of leaving everything else scattered becomes obvious.
We provision and configure the workspace around your device family, your factory and the roles each company actually occupies, so approvals and permissions match the real responsibility split rather than a generic template. The workspace is included in the QMSR readiness diagnostic, which is how most engagements begin.
The useful demonstration is the one framed around your device, your factory and the handoffs that currently cost you the most time. A short call is enough to set that up.