The reconciliation tax

Discipline silos. Mechanical engineers work in CAD, electrical engineers in ECAD, firmware engineers in Git, and manufacturing in spreadsheets and ERP systems. None of these tools understand the others, so every cross-discipline dependency is reconciled manually — in meetings, in email threads, and in the heads of the few engineers who hold the whole product in memory.

Start with ECO cycle time: how long from "we need to change this part" to "the change is approved and released across every discipline." Then count the review meetings per change, the respins caused by missed cross-discipline impacts, and the launch slips attributed to late-discovered mismatches. Teams are usually surprised by the total.

No. Technical debt is the cost of past shortcuts in a single discipline. The reconciliation tax is the ongoing, structural cost of keeping multiple disciplines consistent — it accrues even on perfectly engineered products, because no single tool sees the whole product.

ProductFlo builds a unified engineering graph across your schematics, firmware, CAD, and BOMs — indexing your existing tools in place, with no migration. AI agents then do the reconciliation continuously: cross-checking every change against every affected discipline, so humans review diffs instead of hunting for impacts. The enforcement point is the merge gate.