Why OpenBOM will replace Excel Nightmare for Bills of Materials?

Excel Nightmare for Bills of Materials

Every manufacturing company has a CEO (Chief Excel Officer) to manage BOMs in Excel. So you probably know the difficulties you may face, using Excel:

  • You always get and send the correct version of the BOM.
  • The lack of ability to give the right people access to view or edit the BOM.
  • Copy-pasting errors and the human factor when transferring data from one BOM to another.
  • Complexity in creating multi-level BOMs.
  • Lack of the ability to see who made what changes, and when.
  • Attach the correct version of PDF and instructions to the BOM.
  • Automatic transfer of CAD quantities to the BOM.
  • Automatically calculate rollup cost across multi-level BOMs.

These issues cause engineering and manufacturing delays and errors and increase costs.

OpenBOM is specially designed to avoid all these common Excel issues during Part and BOM management.

Try OpenBOM and you’ll never return to Excel

Create a free account

Why are thousands of engineers and manufacturers from all over the world managing their BOMs with OpenBOM?

OpenBOM is easy to use

1. OpenBOM is easier to use than any PDM, PLM or ERP system and requires no special skills.

Unlike expensive enterprise systems such as PDM, PLM and ERP systems, OpenBOM:

  • Is a cloud tool, so you don’t need costly hardware to use it, don’t need to install anything and think about servers administration.
  • Has intuitively understandable interface and doesn’t require special skills and very little time to learn.
  • Is easy to manage your teamwork on a BOM.

Just register and create or upload your first BOM from CAD or Excel.

2. OpenBOM is integrated with CAD, PLM and ERP systems. We have great partnerships with leading manufacturing software vendors.

No need to waste your time manually creating and updating a BOM. All of your data is automatically synchronized with your engineering and manufacturing tools.

For example, if you made a change in your CAD, press the “Extract BOM” button to see those changes in your BOM.

 

Check whether your system is in this list

Other integrations are available by request as a service.

OpenBOM is integrated with CAD, PLM and ERP systems
Work on a BOM in real-time

3. Work on a BOM in real-time with your team and see instant updates.

Say goodbye to clunky, static web grids, and say hello to Bill of Materials designed for teams. OpenBOM allows multiple people to access BOM information at the same time “a-la Google Doc” and see instant updates. OpenBOM is more than just a web application – it is a canvas for real-time communication and collaboration and will unleash the power of agile workflows for your team. Easily share via email or read-only link and manage access for engineers, supply line and product teams and virtual extended teams. OpenBOM solves the age-old problem of “where is the latest BOM?” ensuring you and your team are always working off the the latest BOM.

See video how it works

4. Connect all of your data from different sources in a single BOM.

Keep all relevant metadata such as quantities, dimension, materials, in a single BOM. For example:

  • Import Excel documents from your contractor with cost and supplier information for each one of the items on your BOM.
  • Update the delivery status from the receiving department documentation.
  • Automatically add links to field service PDFs that contractors provide you.

As a result, all data is on hand and you don’t waste time on searching information in your XLS files or in a mail client.

Watch this video to learn more

Connect all data in a single BOM
Include thumbnail images of your assemblies

5. Include thumbnail images of your parts and assemblies in the BOM.

When OpenBOM generates a BOM from your CAD assembly, it automatically creates a preview image of each part. As result, you can easily identify a part or a changed part in your BOM from its image.

See how you can automatically visualize parts in your BOM

6. All changes and revisions to your BOM are stored in a history log.

Every change in your BOM can be found in a detailed history. Here you can see what was changed, when it was changed, and by whom.  For example, you can easily see that yesterday your engineer reduced the number of screws in an assembly 6 to 5 and not by a message in the history “the value of C5 cell was changed.”

Moreover, you can save immutable BOM revisions, and easily toggle between such revisions or create change report between them.

Watch how to use revisions in a BOM

All changes are stored in a history log
Sharing-Settings

7. All of your data in one place and can only be shared with your permission.

All of your BOM data is stored in a central repository and you, and you only, are able to decide who has access to it.

It works similar to the “sharing” function in Google Docs, your document is private by default, but you can share your BOMs and Part Catalogs with other people and give them edit or view-only permissions.

View the details about the sharing function here.

With the Team version, sharing is even easier because we have special features that automates this process.

8. Manage standard and custom parts for products in centralized Part Catalogs. Easily maintain “quantity on hand” for each part in the catalogs.

Control and interact with part data in Part Catalogs that are assigned to multiple BOMs. As a result of such centralized form of BOM management:

  • Any changes in Part Catalogs are synchronized and automatically reflected in your BOMs.
  • “Where used” tracks the relationships between parts and BOMs.
  • Create Order BOMs automatically to drive purchasing.
  • Order BOMs automatically adjust Quantity On Hand for each part as a Order BOM is released.

Discover more features of Part Catalogs here

Manage parts for products in centralized Part Catalogs

OpenBOM contains dozens features that make your BOM workflow easy

Do you want to know them all?

Watch our Product tour video

OpenBOM works for any size teams

Anyone who needs to create a BOM from the smallest one-person operation to a large enterprise with hundreds of members can find the right solution here. OpenBOM is the solution for:

  • An engineer
  • An individual contractor
  • An engineering team
  • A hardware startup
  • A contract manufacturing shop
  • Or a larger engineering or  manufacturing business.

What does OpenBOM cost?

OpenBOM is available in three subscription plans: User (Free), Team, and Enterprise.

The position of our company is that when registering for any account (even the free one) you get:

  • All the functionality to create, manage and share BOMs.
  • Ability to share and collaborate in real-time on your BOMs.
  • No limits in number of users from one company.
  • No hidden fees or marketing tricks.
  • The ability to export all of your data.
Register and use for free

Premium team and enterprise subscription plans automate the sharing of BOMs and include team administration and integration management. Learn more here.

What customers say about OpenBOM

Ola Kyrkjebø, HY5
business owner

“OpenBOM support gets 10 stars! Thank you for the quick response and effective help.”  

Chris Timbey, Director, Cornfield Engineering Solutions Ltd

“OpenBOM seems the best solution I have come across for decent BOM management without all the other ERP and MRP feature I don’t need.”

Simon Ridley, Technical Director, Display Technologies Ltd.

“Along with Onshape, OpenBOM is allowing us to transform the way we handle our manufacturing!”

Jackson King, RRDCS

“OpenBOM provides an awesome alternative to BOM spreadsheets; I don’t need to use spreadsheets any longer. I love the seamless integration OpenBOM has achieved with the Onshape environment, it saves me time and effort creating my BOMs.”

Kirstaps, Mechanika Engineering

“OpenBOM is the best BOM app available for Onshape. It offers great features and lightning fast support.”

Nick Lumb, Acorn Furniture

“Onshape is amazing for woodworking but manually creating a cutting list is time consuming and altering it after a design change is error prone! openBoM makes creating and updating cutting lists simple, accurate and painless saving us time, effort, and errors.”

Claudio Ventura, e.mod Kitchens

“OpenBOM is a great time-saving alternative to manually creating and updating cutting lists, helping me prevent errors and wasted time.”

Rami Rintaluoma, 3dcad.fi

“Thanks to OpenBOM, I can easily and quickly create cutting lists in Onshape saving me time and reducing errors; design changes are automatically updated by OpenBOM – this is awesome!”

Iain Prosser Greg Rowe, LTD

Having one BoM that is directly linked to the CAD data is really helpful as it eradicates a lot of the human errors that occur when managing BoMs manually.”

Tomáš Majcher, RF Elements

“So far OpenBOM works like a charm and it seems to be the right solution for our company.”

Terry Teague, Engineer Bell-Everman

“Oleg, just wanted you to know I am now using OpenBOM instead of Google sheets. I especially appreciate being able to select “single level bom” and the fact that it automatically inserts it’s the location in Onshape indented under the drawing it is attached to. Also the BOM is generated from the drawing view instead…

John Conaghan, Engineer at an emerging new company

“I would like to make a quick testimonial. I recently had a small issue with a task I was trying to perform. I was overwhelmed with the support and advice I received from Oleg and his team. They went out of their way to help me resolve my issue. I never expected such amazing service.…

How to start using OpenBOM?

We have a documentation and video tutorials, online chat and support team that will help you at any stage if needed. We are also available for training and online consulting. But the interface is so easy and the hints are very clear so the best way to learn the functionality is to register and try it!

Register here as a free user