Company Subscription and Part Number Control 

As we continue developing OpenBOM, we found a growing number of OpenBOM Professional Teams are demanding more advanced set of features. When we first introduced Team Subscription, our intention was to simplify data sharing and enable a group of people to use OpenBOM together, getting automatic sharing of Bill of Materials, Catalogs, and other information. 

In my earlier article, I shared first time our intent to introduce a set of company-oriented features: Part Number control, Part Lifecycle, Administrator priveledges and more. 

Today, I want to give you the first sneak peek at what OpenBOM Part Number control will look like. If you’re using OpenBOM catalogs, you already familiar with OpenBOM distributed catalog systems, otherwise, check the article. Also, I recommend you this article about OpenBOM catalogs:

All you need to know about OpenBOM catalogs

OpenBOM multi-tenant online system provides real-time access to information shared by open catalogs of standard parts, design contracts, suppliers and allowing to OEMs to create products using the data from these catalogs. By doing so, OpenBOM streamlines the product development process and allows manufacturing companies to get access to a single source of truth for information about products and services provided by multiple companies. 

So, the idea of catalogs gives you, a team or to a company to manage multiple catalogs. It has a lot of advantages. However, the question you might ask is how to control part numbers in these catalogs. Even more, you would like to control the uniqueness of Part Numbers in some catalogs and you don’t care about part number uniqueness in some others. 

That’s why Part Numbering control will be useful. It is an important function for every company. To support it, we will be introducing “Company catalogs” with a special check of Part Number uniqueness. 

Here is a first preview of Catalog Administration Console, which will soon become available for company subscribers. As you can see, it will allow you to a company administrator to set the list of catalogs to control Part Numbers. All other catalogs will remain uncontrolled. 

As you can see in the picture above, a selected list of catalogs will be used to control part numbers. By the time, a specific catalog will be included in the list, OpenBOM will automatically check for part number duplicates to ensure the rule of uniqueness is enforced.

The feature will be recommended to companies that will be using OpenBOM to control their product development and use OpenBOM as a master system of all items (standard, engineering, fabricated, outsourced, etc.). 

Conclusion

Part Number control is the first step in the development to enhance OpenBOM with the set of features to control product lifecycle. A new logical entity will be enabled – company. A company administrator will have an enhanced set of priveledges to control system behavior, access, operations, part numbers, and lifecycle. 

At OpenBOM, we are listening to our customers’ demands and developing features to follow our vision of building a new system for distributed manufacturing product development. 

Want to use OpenBOM today? Register for free user subscription now. Interested to discuss requirements you have? Please reach out to us via our website, chat or support email. 

Best, Oleg @ openbom dot com.

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