Modern Product Lifecycle Management
Level Up Your Product Development Experience
OpenBOM is a powerful cloud-based platform that integrates with your existing tools and brings product information together into a single source of truth.
A global digital thread platform to manage product development and connect manufacturers to supply networks
“Getting our BOMs out of Solidworks in Excel was hard. We would add some non-modeled items like hardware then have to manage all those additions individually each time we updated the Excel from Solidworks”. Using OpenBOM with SolidWorks and PDMWorks is much much easier, he says. “OpenBOM easily manages and tracks our part numbers” he goes on to say, “something as simple as finding where a part is used is easy with OpenBOM’s where-used command; not having to open our CAD and look for a part is a huge time-saving.”
“One thing that was attractive was the low barrier to taking us several steps further than Google sheets. We could import directly from Solidworks, an existing Google sheet, or just type in data. OpenBOM functions the way we would expect it too.” says Garrett.
“I love how I can easily add a property, as many properties as I need, to manage costs and other information about Bird Gard items, our existing system just could not do that.” “For example, OpenBOM can easily manage both an item’s Manufacturer Part Number and Supplier Part Number. I just add a column for each number and another for the URL link to the vendor’s product page, it’s that easy.”
“The real benefit”, says Rich, “comes when we hand off a reliable, accurate BOM to our suppliers and manufacturers.” “Generating an accurate BOM has gone from a day to a few minutes.” “The visual thumbnail of each item makes it very clear to everyone involved exactly what item we are referencing in a BOM.”
“I googled API to get data from Autodesk Fusion…. And I discovered OpenBOM.” “In minutes I was working with the free trial, clicked Support, and received a reply in less than 60 minutes. That experience gave me enormous confidence that someone was listening to me as a customer”, Mark explains. “After some more browsing of OpenBOM, we had a call with the OpenBOM team, and felt confident that they understood the manufacturing CAD business process.” “We knew we could trust OpenBOM to liberate data from our design system and bring it to our company.“
“OpenBOM has outstanding Solidworks integration and lets us take our designs from GrabCAD straight into OpenBOM.” “We started small with OpenBOM features, and gradually grew into it. The onboarding and support from the OpenBOM team are excellent.” “The cost analysis we can do now with a reliable BOM is very important to the company and the where-used feature lets us analyze the impact of a single change across the product line. We didn’t know what we were missing, neither of these features is available in CAD BOM tools.”
“We bought OpenBOM because we needed to bring all our FusePLM data forward to a modern system. As of now, we have completely migrated from FusePLM to OpenBOM.” With OpenBOM we can support our sales team with accurate, reliable product cost and component information.“ Prior to OpenBOM, we didn’t really know how much an assembly cost. We had the components but couldn’t track or rollup any cost information to the upper levels. When you have thousands of parts, that cost many thousands of dollars each, it is important to get that right!”
“With OpenBOM”, We can quickly create a new SKU for a customer. OpenBOM reduces cycle times by allowing us to easily reuse an existing BOM, make a few changes, and have an entirely new BOM SKU ready to go to manufacturing. For example, we recently had a requirement for a new ballast enclosure based on an existing design, we easily reused the existing OpenBOM to create the new product. The entire process to reuse a product BOM went from one hour to 5 minutes.”
“It works great! OpenBOM gives my team what they need, without the overhead of large, legacy, systems”, he adds. ”Ease of use is what OpenBOM is all about.” We don’t have an IT department; we are just engineers – OpenBOM doesn’t need an IT department.”
“As the Nexa3D products matured we soon had a BOM administrator dedicating 20 hours a week to maintaining Excel BOMs. With OpenBOM we have no single admin. OpenBOM is largely self-sufficient, no dedicated IT person is needed. It just works.” “Looking back to the decision to buy OpenBOM over two years ago it was rather simple. We needed a solution with low capital investment. SAP and Oracle were out as they require full-time admin. We were lean and agile and wanted a BOM solution that would grow with us and suited to our company. No overhead of a complicated system”. “We looked …
“OpenBOM helps our engineering team design and maintain a cross-functional design and deliver the information needed to my (internal) customer. Before OpenBOM, we didn’t have any systems integration. After a change, many separate BOMs had to be manually updated in several places, OpenBOM took our systems process to the next level giving us an integrated process from design to manufacturing. We selected OpenBOM for many reasons, excellent Fusion 360 integration, simple and easy import, and export to leverage our legacy data, and of course, the cost and customization to meet our …
“OpenBOM is a central feature of my business that allows me to work with many different engineering tools sets, adapt to various customer requirements, and craft and maintain a variety of deliverables; all necessary to meet the needs of each specific customer. OpenBOM’s item master catalog design lets me take a database design approach to components and properties. I like how I can organize my items and BOMs in much the same way as the physical parts, by category, vendor, availability, etc. I literally use OpenBOM to master items and output a BOM exactly in the format the customer …
“I was looking for a system that could hold complex BOMs and revision, control them in a sensible way. I have a lot of experience with large, expensive, cumbersome ERPs like SAP and others, I knew these big traditional systems were not going to be a fit at my company.” “We looked at many other systems, while most contained the basic logistical features we needed, none of the alternatives focused on the hierarchical BOM and revision control that was required by our industry.” “I needed an alternative and OpenBOM fit my needs exactly.”
“OpenBOM is so much simpler than Excel. As material costs have been changing so much lately, it’s comforting to know that when I change an ingredient cost in one place, it updates in all of our product recipes.” “We love how OpenBOM rolls up the cost of all the ingredients to the top-level finished product.”
“Before buying OpenBOM, our CMs had to go to many places to find the information needed to manufacture and build our products, or we had to find it for them, a time-consuming task, especially with revisions and ECOs.” “Now, with OpenBOM, we simply add the CM to our Team and share all drawings, Multi-Level BOMs, item definitions, ECOs, specs, engineering docs, and more all through OpenBOM.” “Everyone absolutely loves the where-used operation in OpenBOM. You just can’t do a where-used operation in an Excel BOM. It is impossible.”
“When we rolled out OpenBOM we just installed it and threw a ton of data at it. I know we would have benefited from formal onboarding but we just needed to get a BOM now – and we did!” “The OpenBOM team later helped me smooth over a few rough spots in my process”, he says. “The pre and post-sales support from OpenBOM is outstanding. The team at OpenBOM are experienced engineers and manufacturing folks and it shows.” “As our process has matured we are finding even more benefits with OpenBOM. As a company, we have to be fast and flexible, we do all the work ourselves, and …
“Something we didn’t see coming with OpenBOM is the benefit to others in the company who consume engineering and BOM information. We have non-technical people using OpenBOM to better understand where a particular item is used, how many of an item exists in a sub-level BOM, or any other item usage information, all without taking time from the Engineer.” “OpenBOM is used by the entire team at Kuva Systems and saves us many hours every week in BOM and inventory management. We understand costs and gaps and our inventory in nearly real-time.” “Simply put, we have a better BOM.”
“Before OpenBOM, we managed all products in a single Google spreadsheet. We had one large document for ALL BOMs, dozens of tabs, some dupes, some tabs had several products…..” “Another file was the Item master. I had to jump from one Google doc to another to ensure correct information when making even the smallest change.” “OpenBOM brings organization and reliability to our data. It’s an interlinked system that allows changing details about one part in one place and it is updated in every BOM.” As you can imagine, a modern lighting system has a lot of parts. “We…
“We started with Excel which met our needs for a while, but later as we matured and moved towards manufacturing, it became very messy”, she explains. “Our product is compact and contains a variety of engineering and component disciplines. We have optical, mechanical, electrical, off-the-shelf components designed for manufacture both in-house and by outside suppliers,” she says. “My team took the time and looked at a lot of alternatives before selecting OpenBOM”, she explains, “from the super inexpensive to the extremely complex, OpenBOM was the right choice for us.”…
Jonathan brought OpenBOM to Tomcar to improve and formalize the agreements the company has with manufacturing partners. “I absolutely love that OpenBOM lets me share accurate, complete BOMs with vendors, partners, customers, my colleagues in Israel, and so many more.”, says Jonathan. “It is great for my team and great for the company. Simply put, before OpenBOM, we did not have a final BOM that was accurate or easy to share”, he says, “We needed a full product BOM which OpenBOM delivered!”
“I did not anticipate the overall benefit of the Solidworks integration” he says. “It was a big WOW! moment. Since then the scope of what we put in OpenBOM has grown. We can control more information, specifications,and requirements. OpenBOM forces adherence to a process!”
OpenBOM is a powerful cloud-based platform that integrates with your existing tools and brings product information together into a single source of truth.
OpenBOM provides fully integrated production planning, vendor and purchasing management to support procurement, contract manufacturing and RFQ processes.
OpenBOM provides predefined data model to manage item catalogs, BOM, Orders, Vendors, and Purchase Order. These data objects are flexible and can be fully customized
The data management architecture of OpenBOM is built using flexible data architecture combining out of the box data objects and fully flexible data definitions…
Whether your teams are colocated, distributed, or fully remote, OpenBOM provides an engaging, intuitive, in-person collaboration experience with multiple options for real-time or asynchronous teamwork on an online product structure.
The data management architecture of OpenBOM is built using flexible data architecture combining out of the box data objects and fully flexible data definitions…
OpenBOM provides predefined data model to manage item catalogs, BOM, Orders, Vendors, and Purchase Order. These data objects are flexible and can be fully customized
An Inside Look At The Ins & Outs Of Doing Business With Outside Sources
OpenBOM supports a wide range of integrations with CAD, PDM, PLM and cloud file storage systems. Integration with ERP systems are supported as paid services based on customer requirements.
OpenBOM supports a wide range of integrations with CAD, PDM, PLM and cloud file storage systems. Integration with ERP systems are supported as paid services based on customer requirements.
Established in 2015 by Newman Cloud Inc., OpenBOM develops modern product-oriented data management and business tools for manufacturing companies. OpenBOM cloud-based real-time collaboration & data management technology allows managing Parts, Catalogs, Bill of Materials, Inventories, and purchase orders across networks of engineers, supply chain managers, and contract manufacturers. OpenBOM enables people to seamlessly share and collaborate data using online Bill of Materials from initial design through all stages of engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain.
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The bill of materials software is something that often considered a simple thing. After all, what can be complex in a list of parts? However, as we can see in practice, manufacturing companies are usually underestimating the complexity and fail to manage it properly. BOM engineering is a complex discipline requires sophisticated data management and you’re trying to avoid it, the results can be brutal and painful. The results are usually very painful and coming faster than you can think – missed components, wrong cost estimation, delayed product deliveries, and frustrated engineers and customers running around trying to figure out where is the last and most updated bills of materials. At OpenBOM, we believe in openness and simplicity as the main drivers to help companies to get up to the speed with data management science behind Bill of Materials. It should be easy to start using OpenBOM and discover how to do it step by step. The Bill of Material is a structure representing all items needed to make a product. Depending on the product and business it includes a different level of details about how the product is engineered, manufactured, assembled, sold and maintained. Every engineering and manufacturing business should be concerned if parts and assemblies, as well as any other related data, are not managed properly.
Very often companies are asking – what to include in the BIll of Materials? A very simple answer to this question is EVERYTHING. The idea of not having something in a BOM is bad and to hope that you will remember what is needed is a recipe for disaster. Very often, we’ve been asked about what is a typical data set of the Bill of Materials. Here is a quick summary of what I think is absolutely essential.
Part Number: This is a unique string that identifies every single component in the product. Not all part numbers are the same. You probably heard about OEM, Manufacturing, Suppliers and many other part numbers. Those are additional pieces of information. You might not use all of them. But, to have a unique Part Number for every single item is a must to have to keep things organized. Description: It usually gives the organization a simple way to look at the details about parts and components. Used for search, simple identification Description is not unique and must not be used to reference parts for any purposes except human interaction. Part Number is used for everything else. Part Name: Names make it easier for organizations to track components. Many systems have internal names with specificity useful to Operations, Test, and Engineering teams. A separate nomenclature might be with customers in Sales organizations. Unlike part numbers, part names aren’t necessarily unique. Consistent use of part names like connector, adapter, and cable, can help keep everyone on the same page. Unit of Measure: A very important piece of information that helps to identify how to measure the quantity of the part. Type (s): Usually absorbs the different types of information to classify part of help to identify how to manage the part. Organizations can apply multiple types to classify parts and how data about part can be processed. Revision and Phase: This is used to identify the level of maturity and specific changes. Companies are using various practices when creating new part numbers of revise existing parts. In addition to these parameters, organizations are usually including information about the manufacturer, suppliers, cost, and other pieces of data in BOMs.
The information I mentioned above is usually the same about the item (part, purchased assembly). However, another group of information is typically included in BOMs and it represents a specific part usage.
A very important element of the Bill of Materials. Effectivity is usually representing specific characteristics saying if a part (or assembly) can be used and under what conditions. There are different types of effectivity – date, configuration, serial number.
Last, but not least piece of information is related to complex products having multiple configurations. A BOM that contains information about multiple configurations usually called “configured BOM” and the BOM that represents information about a single configuration is called resolved.
A list of components represented as one level is usually the basic way to plan the BOM. However, components are connected into assemblies and those usually have sub-assemblies. This is a simple single-multi-level structure. A flattened BOM is a report that summarizes the usage across multiple levels.
OpenBOM Bill of Materials core elements are represented using the Reference-Instance model and described by the following picture. You can see references (items) and their instances combined into parent-child relationships.
OpenBOM provides a super-efficient and easy-to-use user interface to view, control, and collaborates around the Bill of Materials.
