Bill of Materials is the lifeblood of product development and manufacturing process. Modern products are complex and combined with mechanical, electronics and software which creates a big challenge for handling unified multi-disciplinary product structures. Each CAD system can have its own way to produce part lists and export it in a variety of ways to…
One more preview of improved collaborative data synchronization between BOM levels, with roll-up formulas and catalogs. The same as a preview from yesterday – Catalog to BOM real-time collaborative updates, this improvement will provide instant data updates between levels, formulas, and catalogs. This change is part of our user experience improvements and an essential step…
Imagine you work with OpenBOM and you have a catalog and few BOMs open in multiple browsers. Also, one of your colleagues has a BOM open in the browser. You made an update of the catalog. Until now, you should have been refresh the browser to see updated catalog data. Kind of annoying. You complained…
Life is tough these days. As the world is struggling with the COVID19 pandemic, I found that people are amazing and do everything they can to help to fight Coronavirus around the globe. I can see many of my friends and industry colleagues are working these days on various manufacturing projects – creating PPE, creating…
To finish my 3 parts set of articles about OpenBOM Data Modeling, I want to bring a few practical examples about how to create data models in OpenBOM as well as to answer on typical questions our customers are asking when starting using OpenBOM. I highly recommend you to check OpenBOM Data Management Fundamentals. Also, …
The world is rapidly changing these days towards remote work and online services. COVID19 is probably a black swan event for moving work online. Before starting OpenBOM, I realized that online consulting can really work. I offered PLM consulting service online and cut the big amount of cost-saving on airplanes, hotels, and travels. At OpenBOM,…
Coronavirus pandemic created an unprecedented situation in the world when we are forced to work remotely. For many engineers and product development teams is a new world in which they need to figure out how to communicate with their colleagues and stay productive. Tools like Zoom, Slack and many others are here to rescue you,…
How to stop using Excel to manage Bill of Materials (BOM) in a few days using OpenBOM? This is a big question I’ve been asking myself for many years. My passion to replace Excel started with one of my first blog articles – Why do I like my PLM Excels? While it was clear to…
We live in a very unique time. COVID19 pandemic is impacting everyone these days – families, businesses, friends. As the situation continues to affect more businesses, I decide to take a moment to reach out and share information about how OpenBOM operates these days and how we support our users and customers. Before diving in…
PLM was born to provide a solution for large enterprise manufacturing companies. So, it was ERP – Enterprise Resouce Planning. The co-existence of PLM and ERP in manufacturing enterprises were always painful and demanded integrations. All these integrations are complex and expensive and required service contracts. The situation is pretty bad for both PLM and…
Today, I’d like to continue my articles about OpenBOM data management. In my previous article, I was converting reference-instance fundamentals. Please check it here. You can check also OpenBOM Data Management fundamentals article, which speaks about three important elements of OpenBOM data management model: 1- Data management architecture 2- Reference-instance model 3- Parent-chield relationships To…
Integrations are critically important in manufacturing. After all, product development and manufacturing activities usually require multiple applications integrating together. In a traditional application space – desktop applications and enterprise applications, integrations are often complex and require significant efforts in developing services, using various APIs and data formats. When it comes to cloud applications, integrations are…
Today, I want to talk about how you can create a BOM from Solidworks and update data back when you made changes in OpenBOM. The scenario is often used by different people because of ease of how data can be updated in OpenBOM in the grid-like user interface. With some restriction, OpenBOM can solve the…
This is article is part of our “How to” series of articles giving you a quick intro to how to perform a specific task using OpenBOM from the beginning to the end. Today we will give you an end to end run of OpenBOM Add for Autodesk Inventor and show how in 5-6 minutes you…
The March 2020 release of OpenBOM introduces two new and exciting features, 1) Multi-Level Revisions and, 2) OpenBOM storage. Both are designed to take your BOMs to the next level allowing you to track exactly which revision of a sub-assembly BOM is present in a particular top-level assembly BOM and to enable reference file storage…
Today, I want to start a series of demo videos to talk about the OpenBOM data management platform and capabilities. OpenBOM provides a set of very unique data management features. To learn these features will help you to start using OpenBOM more efficiently and create a data management strategy for your company. The storyboard of…
Integration with ERP is an often requested feature in OpenBOM. While when it comes to ERP integration one size doesn’t fit all, there are few general principles of how data can be transferred. One would be called bottom-up when you will take all assemblies on the lower level of your BOM and transfer it to…
I want to give you a very first preview of the OpenBOM integrated storage function. We’ve been around the decision to provide OpenBOM storage for quite some time. OpenBOM integrates with any cloud storage system out of the box (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, etc.). While it is no brainer decision to connect to one…
It has been a long time since I wrote blogs about the basics of BOM, Bill of Materials and BOM management. While it is pretty obvious that the Bill of Materials is a lifeblood of every since the manufacturing process, I found people are getting confused about how BOM management is directly connected to company…
There are three typical manufacturing processes – built to stock, configure to order or custom product development (sometimes called engineering to order). Today, I want to talk about the last one that very often brings a lot of complexity in both design and manufacturing aspects of the process. There are two main characteristics of engineering…
The only thing that is constant is change. During product design, engineering, production planning, manufacturing, support… any manufacturing organization will be going through the process of continuous changes. This is a reality and to be able to manage these changes in the Bill of Materials is extremely important. In this webinar, we provide some basics…
Modern manufacturing products are complex and created by multi-disciplinary teams of engineering working on mechanical, electronic, software, systems. To treat this level of complexity is not a simple task and existing tools are too often focused on a single domain – MCAD, PCB Design, etc. How to make a change and create a structured multi-disciplinary…
The Bill of Materials is a fundamental part of product development. Traditionally, CAD and design were considered as a source of all product information. But this status quo is changing fast as product development is moving into a multi-discipline zone. None of the modern products are purely mechanical products. Each product today includes some electrical…
Product structures and bill of materials are complex data entities. A typical BOM is a collection of items that might look like a simple list. But when you attempt to manage data around the Bill of Materials and product structure you can find it insanely complex. Any product is a hierarchy of elements. These elements…
A catalog model is a fundamental building block of OpenBOM data organization. Think about it as a distributed storage of all items data. Everything you have in your company – engineering parts, standard parts, products, literally everything is stored in OpenBOM catalogs. You can create a single catalog of multiple catalogs. Each catalog can have…
How to escape from Excel? Data migration is hard Moving your BOM from Excel to the cloud shouldn’t be… In this webinar, we discuss best practices and useful tricks on how to escape the Excel-universe of BOM management and manage product data in a structured way. It covers examples of import data from various Excel…
I’m excited to share that the last release of OpenBOM introduced an integrated 3D viewer. It is available for Beta testing and we are looking for users and customers interested to check this out. It can be tested by any OpenBOM user, to create a 3D viewer option, you will need OpenBOM Solidworks Add-in to…
Happy Friday! Are you familiar with Never Ending Job of Painting Golden Gate Bridge? I’ve heard about the story during many of my trips to San Francisco when I was working for Autodesk. Golden Gate bridge painter is a hard and never-ending job. Why do I speak about Golden Gate never-ending projects? Because writing documentation…
Going back to basics in today’s webinar and talk about the fundamental things – BOM types. Often there are tons of confusion around BOM types – EBOM, MBOM, XBOM, SBOM… you name it. We don’t talk about them today. We will do it later. Today, we talk about 4 fundamental types of Bill of Materials…
IMBU has been monitoring and analyzing compression equipment in the most remote places on the planet for years and provides a proven solution which works under the toughest conditions. As such, IMBU is all about reliability and operation under tough conditions. “We felt very strongly about the ability to have a plug-and-play installation for Ariel…
The first video is about improvements in full-text search in part search dashboard. The current OpenBOM search includes default fuzziness option switched on, which often can create more results expected by users. While initially, we thought it is a good option, we decided to tune it down and change the command… In the next release,…
New Zealand’s Nyriad LTD is a software company at the nexus of computational storage infrastructure. Together with OpenBOM and their partners, Nyriad develops technology that will enable a more robust, energy-efficient and secure Internet. They have spent the last 5 years carefully connecting the underlying threads between the CPU, GPU, Memory, and Storage to create…
CATIM Bill of Materials requirements is as diverse as their products! According to CATIM Solution Architect, “Combining BOMs from disparate design systems was next to impossible using Excel”. Creating Automation and Technology In Motion – that’s what www.catim.co is all about. CATIM designs and manufactures a wide variety of automation solutions for buildings, factories and…
Companies buy 70% of parts of stuff used in products. Standard components, fasteners, re-usable stuff – cabinets, motors, pumps, PCB controllers, caster wheels, bearings… you name it. How to manage all this stuff in the Bill of Materials. It sounds very simple but turns out as a nightmare. The parts from a purchased assembly are…
The procurement of components is one of the most important activities that stands between design and production. About 70% of parts in every product are either purchased or outsourced. With such a high volume of procurement, to make it happen smoothly is one of the fundamental requirements of successful product development and a foundation of…
The last year was a huge success for OpenBOM. If you missed my earlier blog, please check – OpenBOM – Looking back in 2019. Very briefly- OpenBOM was named as high-performer in the G2 Crowd PLM Grid report, we growth x6 time and established a unique design to purchase process helping small and medium-sized companies…
The Holidays Break is over. This year, we will continue our weekly educational webinars about BOM management. Today, I want to announce next week’s webinar, which is about the topic that near and dear my heart – purchasing and Bill of Materials. To create a good Bill of Materials for purchasing is almost an art.…
One of the most complex things in engineering data management is to coordinate two BOMs – engineering BOM (EBOM) and manufacturing BOM (MBOM)… Oops. Did I just say we need to coordinate two BOMs? Does it mean we must have two BOMs? Or maybe we can have a single BOM? These few sentences above can…
How often you use Solidworks and have a situation where you model assemblies but later buy them as “purchased assembled” (bearings, pumps, etc). On average 70% of parts and assemblies in the product you manufacturing are either outsourced or purchased. Purchased and outsourced assemblies can be great to optimize cost and work optimization, but it…
Happy New Year! We are starting 2020 on the right foot by introducing an improved Solidworks add-in data model and user experience. Historically, OpenBOM Solidworks Add-in was using File Name as an identifier of objects in Bill of Materials created from Solidworks. The strong feedback from customers and our own learning watching some of the…
A new year is an opportunity to look back and check what we’ve done, what is our purpose and what we would like to achieve next. You need to step back to see what you did because in day to day craziness, we often forget the things we accomplished. The slowdown Holiday season is a…
The information in the Bill of Materials and Catalogs sometimes is very complex and contains dozens of attributes. Grid is a good way to present them together, but often to have a panel with a set of attributes placed in a vertical column can be very useful. Therefore, we created the Item Information Panel. Sometimes…
Just in a few days, we will step in a new decade. As always at the end of the year, we ask ourselves what we learned in the past year and what we would like to take with us in a new year and especially in a new decade. We learned a bunch of things…
Everyone needs the information that is in the Bill of Materials. But everyone needs it to be delivered differently. Engineers might have an access to all assemblies and sub-assemblies, descriptions, technical information about parts. Procurement has information about suppliers, contractors, and cost. How to balance all this information together. Typically. Organizations are struggling with the…
A few weeks ago, we shared news about OpenBOM on G2 Crowd Inc, the world’s leading business solutions review website. If you missed that article, check this out here – What customers and users are saying about OpenBOM on G2 Crowd. We’ve been excited by the support of our customers saying so many good words…
PLM Philosophy blog suggested an interesting article about 100%, 120% and 150% Bill of Materials. Check it out here What is mean by 100 %, 120 % and 150% BOM to get more details. Here are passage and the picture. The BOM contains all alternative parts, full overlays of parts is known as 150 %…
I’m always saying BOM is teamwork. A single person doesn’t do a BOM. A mechanical engineer can do his work, PCB design can do his. But somebody should get access to this Bill of Materials for purchasing. Contractors should get it as well, including STEP files and sales should get it to know what features…
This week we continued the serious of “BOM Basics” webinars and speak about people. Yes, I always like to say that technologies are easy, but people are hard. Bill of Materials Management is teamwork that requires the coordination of many people in the single process of creation and use of information in the bill of…
At OpenBOM, we believe in the visual Bill of Materials. Therefore, almost from day one at OpenBOM, we wanted to allow users to share visual information. This is how we can with OpenBOM Images Properties. These properties can be generated automatically when you extract data from the CAD system and placed in the OpenBOM Bill…
The manufacturing industry is going through a major transformation these days. There is significant pressure on OEM to change their business models and transform companies from being totally focused on product development into companies focused on providing services to their customers. There are many examples of how this business transformation can go. One of the…
Communication between engineering and manufacturing isn’t simple. OpenBOM helps you to integrate with any CAD system (check more here – OpenBOM Integrations). Right after you integrated OpenBOM with CAD, the question about next integration pattern will come – how to integrate engineering BOM with ERP system. Before jumping to discuss how to integrate OpenBOM with…
The manufacturing world around us is quickly transforming and the biggest change I can see around us is the creation of online services. A decade ago, we lived in a world that was driven by files and emails. This means everything was pretty much done by applications running on the computer and then send to…
Product development and manufacturing is hard. Remember the time when you were able to buy a bad car? It is over. All the cars are good now. The same is happening with all the other products. The customer expectations are skyrocketing these days. The complexity of products is growing enormously – products are becoming connected,…
A few years ago, I was talking to one manufacturing company. They developed great products, but struggle with execution and manufacturing. I asked them – how do you manage Bill of Materials? The answer was shocking… They told me “we don’t”….. 12!@#!@(@(#!@# – that was my answer. How come? What do you do? The person…
One more feature request and the way to streamline the process of part creation in OpenBOM. Catalogs are the way to manage Item Masters for all types of parts you have in your company. Think about standard, engineering and any other items. When you create a BOM you can make a selection of existing parts.…
Search is one of these functions that everyone is looking for when it comes to data management. To be able to identify and isolate the data you need is extremely important. At OpenBOM, we developed multiple approaches to easily slice and dice data in different ways. To remind you what is available today here are…
The bill of materials 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. The results are usually very painful and coming faster than you can…
I’ve been attending Autodesk University 2019 last week in Las Vegas, NV. During Design and Manufacturing Keynote, Stephen Hooper Autodesk Vice President and General Manager of Fusion 360 announced the big news – merging the two design environments of Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Eagle. Autodesk is the first CAD company that merge MCAD and…
Product Structure of the Bill of Materials is the lifeblood of product development and manufacturing. Think about every product that companies are designing, manufacturing and using. The information about parts, how many of them, who manufacture them and where companies purchased them is a foundation of the company product development process. Information about what is…
You can think about the Bill of Materials as a flat list of parts placed in the drawings. This is a simplistic and wrong way to think about the information. Here is a slide deck I captured a few weeks ago at PI PLMx in San-Diego by Rick Chang, Director – Enterprise Methods and Tools,…
I’m super excited to share with you more information about the last OpenBOM release before Thanksgiving break and to include several important usability improvements in OpenBOM User Interface. Here is a shortlist of what we did. Adaptive names of OpenBOM headers for Parent-Child relationships. As you know, OpenBOM automatically manages hierarchical relationships between components in…
You’ve made a great design for a new product. Or you’ve made a new feature for an existing product. These things are exciting, but by far not enough to make turn this product into a reality. The reality can be messy as going from design to assembly requires you to go through the many steps…
Want to learn more about how to manage data about the product you design, manufacturing and support? As much as BOM sounds like a simple thing (it is just a list of parts you can see), BOM management can introduce many questions, dilemmas and decisions you better be prepared for. At OpenBOM we are taking…
Bill of Materials (or how companies call it sometimes “product structure”) is an essential part of product information. BOMs contain data about assemblies, quantities, effectivities, description, cost, manufacturers, suppliers. BOMs give you a way to define part numbers and manage essential information about items. You can ask – what about related documentation? All files, documents,…
We are reviewing everything these days. From 25$ earbuds and 100$ hotel rooms to phones computers, apartments, trips… you name it. A consumer economy is booming and it is impacting business software. I’m sure you’ve heard about Yelp and it is a time to discover G2 Crowd reviews. At OpenBOM we are all about users…
As the world is moving towards connected web applications, we are at OpenBOM are discovering new opportunities to integrate OpenBOM with platforms and applications used by engineerings and manufacturing companies. Digital Thread is an industry game-changer. Navigate your browser to a recent article by PTC here. Improving time-to-market and cost (top and bottom lines) by…
There is only one constant thing in the world. It is a change. Engineering and manufacturing companies are living and breathing the changes every single day. And to make it right is one of the most important things. And here is a challenge… if you do less than needed, you miss things that must be…
Ease of navigation between data is somewhat very important when you work with such complex data as the Bill of Materials, Catalogs, and other related information. How to make it easy is not a simple task. Existing data paradigms are part of the challenge when you’re coming to a new tool. Folders and document lists…
A new feature of Item Master panel is to support multiple catalogs. In the previous release, we introduced Item Master panel – a very easy way to create new items in the catalog directly from BOM. However, if you work with multiple catalogs, you can now select what catalog to use for a new item…
Long-awaited feature to import Vendor list from a spreadsheet is here. Yay! Now you can import the existing Excel spreadsheet of vendors you’re working with directly into OpenBOM. The import Vendor List function is available from the main dashboard menu The key property in the Vendor list is Vendor Name. If your spreadsheet contains Vendor…
The magic names such as EBOM, MBOM, SBOM, and others are standing for a specific domain of knowledge — engineering, manufacturing, planning, supplier, etc. Sometimes, you can hear XBOM, which literally means any BOM. The division is logical (based on people’s role) and often system data siloed — CAD, PLM, ERP, etc. The recommendation of…
As you probably heard, PTC agreed to acquire Onsahpe. The press release and additional materials from PTC can be found here. PTC is acquiring Onshape because we have a deep commitment to providing innovative technology that drives business value and enhances your competitive position. It is a technological purchase. Read more of my thoughts here…
CAD is one of the main sources of data when it comes to Bill of Materials. This is a starting point where the design starts and it is a foundation of product data. However, an attempt to put all information in a CAD system can lead to confusion and problems. In our recent webinar, we…
Efficiency is a killer in all manufacturing companies. Better, faster, cheaper. You probably heard it many times. Many manufacturing companies, especially small ones are experiencing significant difficulties in organizing their processes. The lack of IT resources and high levels of distribution are the key factors. Companies are working with contractors, designers, suppliers located everywhere and…
Happy Friday! Today I want to review a new coming search user experience in OpenBOM Part Search. Those of you who tried this search before reported not a very useful way to present the data. To be honest, we also felt unhappy with the part search. So, I’m very happy to preview this new user…
Old habits die hard. BOMs and Drawings are one of the most controversial topics in engineering data management. Back in days when a drawing was the most reliable piece of information about the product (after a corkboard on the shop floor, of course :)), people put BOMs on the face of drawings. Modern digital transformation…
OpenBOM gives an amazing solution for Solidworks users. Think about finishing your dream Solidworks project. You’re almost done with your favorite design and you cannot wait to move it forward to production. It can be a contract manufacturer or just a shopfloor. In your dream, you would like to push the button and say “Make…
Once you registered to OpenBOM, you probably have a question – what to do next? As much as it is a very simple question, I can tell you it is a not. Bill of Materials just feels and sounds simple. In fact, BOM management is a complex discipline that requires some educating, knowledge gathering and…
For every engineering using the CAD system, the design of the product is a lot of fun. But, when the time comes to order parts…not really. You need to create a BOM or Part List, organize it in the right way, filter by components types, vendor, etc. It sounds like simple tasks, but when you…
One of the most critical features in BOM management is the ability to manage multi-level structures (BOM). Think about complex structure of assemblies, sub-assemblies, and parts. When you have hundreds, thousands and more parts, it is very hard to calculate how many parts you need to purchase for a specific machine (eg. Top Level Assembly). …
Food is one of the best examples to illustrate the Bill of Materials Management and manufacturing. If you think about it more, any restaurant is practically a manufacturing shop floor. You have products (dishes) that must be manufactured (cooked). To make them, you need to buy standard parts and outsource work (food ingredients and other…
Earlier this week webinar about one of the most complex BOM management topic – interchangeable revisions and part numbers. Managing part revisions is hard and BOM revisions are even harder. How and when is a change just a change and when is it a new part? Earlier this week, we explained important use cases of…
When it comes to BOM management software, spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are one of the most popular. And it is not because Spreadsheets are very simple and flexible, but because an alternative is very complex and expensive. As a result, individual engineers, contractors, and entire manufacturing companies are still choosing…
One more quick preview of changes in the OpenBOM dashboard coming in the next release. It is related to the search experience. We found a bit confusing to have two separate searches – for parts and for BOMs and catalogs in the dashboard. We combined it now and you can have a quick switch between…
Simple things are hard. In the coming release, we are making changes in an element of OpenBOM user interface that was created a long time ago – OpenBOM Dashboard. We realized the need to do so. And changes will be gradually coming to simplify dashboard functions. Today, I want to show you an updated dashboard…
The question about Part Numbers, schemas and the way it will be organized and managed are always the topic that drives a lot of debates and misunderstanding. Although it might be a thing that easy – it is just a number you identify a part, an assembly or an entire product, it impacts in many…
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. From the first days of OpenBOM, we wanted to deliver a simple yet powerful solution for the Bill of Materials editing. As much as you think about BOMs as a simple list of items, in fact, this is not a simple list. Once data about is entered into a BOM,…
I’m super excited to share with you news about the new OpenBOM add-in for Fusion 360. We’ve been working closely with many OpenBOM users and learn what to improve in OpenBOM for Fusion360. Here is a shortlist of new things that will be coming very soon. 1- New compact user interface. We understood how important…
If you’re using Autodesk Eagle for your electronic PCB designs, you know that one day you need to create Bill of Materials to plan production, estimate cost and making purchases. Eagle is a very flexible environment and you can use ULP programs to do almost everything you want. So you export BOM to Excel can…
Bill of Materials is the lifeblood of every manufacturing company and business. However, when it comes to the data, manufacturing companies are usually facing many challenges related to how this data should be organized, stored and managed For many years, CAD was an ultimate tool to store all information. This is usually a place where…
Bill of Materials aways sounds like a simple thing. You probably heard it before – BOM is a list of parts, what’s the big deal about it? Well… actually not really simple. You can start from a simple list, but you can find yourself deep in the complexity of data management very soon- parts, usages…
If you are using Siemens Solid Edge to design products, one day you will have to create BOM to build an actual product. Even Solid Edge has BOM report function, it will open a pandora box of Excel BOM management. The last thing you want your manufacturing organization to do is to get drawn into…
If you are using Autodesk Inventor to design products,it will be a day you will need a Bill of Materials to build an actual product. Autodesk Inventor has a tool to create a Bill of Materials and also to include it in a drawing and export it to Excel. While this is very much standard,…
If you use SOLIDWORKS to design products, one day you will obviously need to create a Bill of Materials for what you want to build. As every professional 3D Mechanical CAD system, SOLIDWORKS gives you a way to create a Bill of Materials table in a drawings as well as to export BOM to Excel. …
OpenBOM data organization contains Bills of Materials and Catalogs. If you’re not familiar with data modeling in OpenBOM I recommend you to check a few articles to get up to speed. OpenBOM Data Management Fundamentals How Many Catalogs To Create in OpenBOM In some situations, you can create a Bill of Materials from the CAD…
This question is asked by OpenBOM users and customers more often than you can think about. Although you can think about BOM as a list of parts in the drawing, this way of thinking about information about a product, parts, cost and many other related pieces of data is very simplistic. We are often asked…
The question about what is BOM (Bill of Materials) sometimes drives controversy in manufacturing companies. It happens that different people see BOM different or use different terminology to describe it. Think about engineers, manufacturing planners, people making cost assessment, supply chain and purchasing. I found an article in PLM Philosophy Blog speaking about what is…
I’m very much excited to give a first preview of the work we’re doing to improve customer workflows and feature scope of OpenBOM and Autodesk Fusion360 integration. For the last months, we’ve been working with many Autodesk Fusion360 customers and learned about their demands and needs in improvements of workflows between OpenBOM and Autodesk Fusion360. …
The spreadsheets are part of everyday life for every single manufacturing company. People love them despite all the mess they can bring. And people hate them because of the same reasons. At OpenBOM we are taking an approach to integrate spreadsheets into the user experience and workflows in a non-invasive way. So, we are good…
I had a great honor to present at ConX19 – event organized by the Institute for Process Excellence. Check out more about the event on the website. In my presentation, I was sharing what is my perspective on digital transformation in engineering and manufacturing software. As an industry, we are at a very interesting point…
I’m very much excited about our new BOM management educational webinars. At OpenBOM we accumulated a huge spectrum of knowledge about Bill of Materials, BOM management, best practices, and related topics of engineering and manufacturing. As part of our contribution to openness and knowledge about engineering and manufacturing, we decided to start a weekly webinar,…
Excel (or spreadsheets) is one of the greatest inventions of IT for the last decades. Flexible, powerful and easy to use. But, it brings too many problems when it comes to engineering and product data management. In my Do’s and Don’ts of Escape Plan from Excel, I shared my recommendation on how you can move…
CAD data is one of the main sources of engineering information used to create the Bill of Materials and extract additional data to organize OpenBOM Catalogs. OpenBOM provides a wide range of CAD integrations. You can get list of available OpenBOM integrations on our website here. If you have questions about specific integrations, please reach…
Best practices of Import BOM or Catalog to OpenBOM from your existing spreadsheet The things are rarely happening in the vacuum. Usually, you have already a bunch of data in spreadsheets you want to bring to OpenBOM to keep managing or using this data in the future. What are the most typical use cases? Over…
One of the ways to create a new BOM or Catalog is to create them from scratch. If you skipped the fundamentals of OpenBOM data management, I recommend you to check this out before moving forward. BOM and Catalogs are fundamental elements of data in OpenBOM. Catalog defines a distributed database of all items (standard,…
I’m starting the next level of OpenBOM Basics series of blog articles. In my first series (OpenBOM 101), I covered the main features of OpenBOM in my 101 videos. You can watch them on openbom.com/pricing page or Youtube Channel. Today, I want to talk about fundamental elements of OpenBOM data management. I will be talking…
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. …
We’ve been getting many requests to expand OpenBOM integration with Google Sheet. I’m happy to share some early information about OpenBOM import from Google Sheet coming in the next release (yay!!!). So, let’s say, I want to import BOM from the following Google Sheet The first function will integrate Google Sheet file picker from OpenBOM import…
Management of Part Numbers is often causes some confusion for customers working with Solidworks. The questions about Part Number settings are coming so often, so I decided to write a short article to help our users installing OpenBOM for Solidworks to get around. First thing first. How Solidworks manages part numbers. There are 3 main…
Since the very early days of OpenBOM, we’ve been focusing on how to help engineers and teams to work together. OpenBOM unique real-time collaboration and sharing helps people working on the same project, product, Bill of Materials to share data and exchange information. At the same time, we are continuously learning new things from our…
Working with Solidworks multi-body part such as weldment can be tricky in Solidworks. Especially when you need to create Bill of Materials. In some situations you would like to have an entire Solidworks part as a single line in a BOM. And sometimes, you need it to have with all bodies as a cutlist. Fortunately,…
Autodesk Fusion360 plug-in for OpenBOM is going through the series of enhancements and improvements based on your feedback and requirements we collected. Today, I want to show you one of my favorites new features in Fusion360 plug-in and this is Template support. It allows you to create a template for both BOM and Catalog. You…
Modern products are often a combination of mechanical and electronic components. Electronic wrapped in plastic or smartphones on wheels. You probably heard it before. At OpenBOM, we are working on how to help manufacturing companies and engineers to work with multi-disciplinary Bill of Materials combining mechanical parts and electronics together. Today, I want to preview…
The calculation is an important part of the Bill of Materials. I’m sure don’t need to explain why. OpenBOM does have some very unique and powerful calculations features allowing you to do things that are pretty much beyond what you can accomplish with Excel. Think about making roll-ups of cost, mass and other things in…
Colored parts often represent some level of difficulties when you attempt to manage it in Bill of Materials and inventory. Imagine that your company is manufacturing pumps that can be ordered in different colors. You don’t know upfront what color of the pump will be ordered. You can, of course, to define Part Number for…
One of the questions often comes from new OpenBOM users about Catalogs – how many Catalogs should I create? This is a great and important question. So, I wanted to spend some time to give a recommendation about how to organize data in OpenBOM catalogs. In a nutshell, OpenBOM manages data organized as catalog(s) and…
OpenBOM data management gives you a lot of flexibility. While in general, I see it a very good thing and can give you a lot of value really quick, it can be also confusing sometimes. Today, I want to talk about different ways to manage data in multi-level structures and some rules I recommend you…
A few days ago, I wrote an article explaining how OpenBOM is managing the parent-child structure of information in Bill of Materials. If you missed that article check it out. OpenBOM provides a robust and transparent parent-child relationship management systems. It allows you to keep flexible editing mechanisms by typing, selecting and changing of data.…
Even OpenBOM looks and smells like a spreadsheet, inside OpenBOM manages data using multiple databases. The concept of a spreadsheet is applied to OpenBOM user experience. To manage data, you need to define “properties” in OpenBOM. You can think about them as a database field. OpenBOM is flexible allows you to define, change and delete…
Earlier this week several customers asked me to clarify how OpenBOM can manage parent-child relationships. After answering on several questions, I decided to come with the blog post to share it with others as well. So, first things first… OpenBOM has a mechanism to automatically capture and create parent-child relationships based on Part Numbers. It…
I’m thrilled to share that first OpenBOM integration with accounting package is now available. You can integrate between OpenBOM and Quickbooks Online. Obvious question why do you need it and what are benefits? The internal process of a small and medium-size manufacturing company has 2 two polar points – (1) Design; (2) Accounting. These two…
If you’re a longtime citizen of engineering and manufacturing communities, you probably heard people saying that if you have 2 engineers, you might have 3 opinions about how to do something. It is especially true when it comes to discussions about how to organize and manage data. At OpenBOM, we knew from a very early…
One of the questions I’m getting from users is how to create a link from OpenBOM to other sources of information. Engineering information is very much intertwined and to have connections between files storages, online catalogs, and other data sources is a very typical situation. OpenBOM gives you a universal way to connect with External…
Another cool new feature coming soon in OpenBOM. Many of you asked us how to transform your existing BOM spreadsheets into nested structure Bill of Materials. For many companies, the structure like I show on the image before is a very typical way to store and manage Bill of Materials. How to transform this flat…
When it comes to Bill of Materials, calculations is one of the most important things. Think about BOM as a recipe of what you need to do. How many materials and parts you need to buy and what do you need to order. A simple way to organize calculations in OpenBOM is to create a…
Cloud software is evolving with new features and functions. As such Onshape was evolving and introduced new user experience. Which made me think it is a good time to share an updated workflow of how to integrate OpenBOM Bill of Materials with Onshape Drawings. Before giving you step-by-step instruction on how to do so, some…
Bill of Materials is a lifeblood of your manufacturing business. It defines all components and assemblies you need to have to produce a product. To make it happen, the lifeblood needs to flow between places and people in your product development business process. Even if you’re a small manufacturing company or hardware team working on…
User experience is one of the things companies are thinking more these days. At OpenBOM we are thinking about how to help people exploring what OpenBOM can do in the fastest and efficient way. Video is a great source of information. Since very early days of OpenBOM we developed tons of videos to demonstrate how…
One of the questions often asked by OpenBOM users and customers is how OpenBOM is merging data between CAD systems and Bill of Materials in OpenBOM. After talking to many users, I thought I’m ready now to write an article to summarize it and also clarify some potential misunderstanding. To start with, I’m talking about…
Earlier this week, I shared a series of articles about OpenBOM BOM and Catalogs. If you missed that, I will encourage you to take a look and Demystifying BOM and Catalogs Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In the coming release, we are going to introduce a few new options how to improve user…
I’m coming with the final part of my set of articles about OpenBOM Bill of Materials and Catalogs. Check Part One and Part Two before moving forward. In this article, I’d like to share a set of basic steps you need to follow to create catalogs and bill of materials using OpenBOM. At the end,…
I continue my set of articles about OpenBOM Bill of Materials and Catalogs. If you missed Part One, please navigate here to catch up. The way to think about Catalog(s) in OpenBOM is to think about an entire set of everything your company manufacturing and all assemblies, sub-assemblies, fabricated components, standard parts you’re using. In…
If there is something in engineering and manufacturing companies that I learn for sure for the last two decades is that terminology is hard. Engineers are continuously using different terminology as a result of existing practices, industry-specific domain or application suites used by companies to design products. All together created quite a complex dilemmas…
Formulas are important. After all, Bill of Materials is a recipe of the product and calculation and rollups are big part of main BOM features. At OpenBOM we allow to create formulas that operates on text, number and currency properties. I’m excited to give you a very first and very early preview of what changes…
All products these days is some sort of combination of electronics and mechanical design. It comes everywhere and creates a new level of complexity. From the early days of OpenBOM we knew that BOM is not only a reflection of mechanical parts. It is also a combination of information created in mechanical and electronic design…
In this article, I want to share detailed information about new OpenBOM data properties – Data and Currency. Date Property The new Date property type and with Date widget selector in the grid allows you to choose Date and save it in a preferable format. Settings of default data is in the User Preference dialog.…
We are expanding property types in OpenBOM. If you missed an earlier article, check this out – we are adding Currency property. One more coming enhancement in OpenBOM is Date property. The mechanism to add property is the same. You need to choose “Date” type. And as you do, the date property will be added.…
I have to admit – this is one of the long-awaited enhancements of OpenBOM. But later is better than never. New property types are coming to OpenBOM – currency and date. In this article, I will give you a quick preview of the Currency property type. The mechanism of Adding property is the same. However,…
Any BOM or Catalog in OpenBOM can easily be shared by clicking the “Share” button with anyone with an OpenBOM account using their email. So, sharing is fast and easy. But the act of sharing a BOM requires one to actually do so. Although you can register to openBoM and use it for free, there…
OpenBOM User Defined views is a very powerful mechanism that allows you only to see data you want or need to see in BOM or catalog. While this feature is useful by itself, OpenBOM can do even more with user-defined views. The same user-defined view mechanism can be amplified by OpenBOM Professional Team subscription and…
An OpenBOM Team Admin manages and controls who gain access to OpenBOM within a Team or organization. Access is not limited to internal, i.e., company, team members. Team members can include contract manufacturers, suppliers, among others. Moreover, Team Admins can enable automatic BOM sharing among team members making it possible for everyone on the team…
The core function of production planning is to calculate how many parts need to be ordered to make a production batch. OpenBOM does by creating order BOM and calculating quantity gaps for each part. When you create order BOM, OpenBOM takes Quantity needed from flattened BOM and calculate x number of units. That is your…
The end goal of every design and manufacturing process is to assemble a product and ship it a customer. This is in a nutshell what is manufacturing business about. Since on average 70% of the product is usually outsourced assemblies and purchased parts with depended on dozens and sometimes on hundreds of partners, to plan…
A Vendor List contains information about companies you’re using as a source of standard parts as well as contractors and suppliers. We call them Vendors. The functionality is very simple.- to allow to create sets of information about vendors. As everything in OpenBOM, vendor lists are fully flexible. You can add/remove any property. This is…
To manage parent-child relationships is a fundamental function in the Bill of Materials. OpenBOM does it on demand by connecting Part Numbers. It is a very useful function that can apply in many situations. You can think about complex structure, order or anything like this. While Multi-level BOM is a structure, you can think of…
For the last several months since we introduced OpenBOM Design to Purchase solution, we’ve been asked by customers to provide integration with accounting software. And, Quickbooks traditionally took the first place in the list of demanded integrations. To remind you of this workflow: Today, I’m happy to share a sneak preview of OpenBOM, which close…
OpenBOM has a flexible export function including a selection of properties, filters, sort, ordering rows and customization of a company logo. I want to talk today about the last one, which is pretty important. You can create your company BOMs, export it to PDF format to send to the contractor, suppliers and manufacturing shop floor…
Formulas in OpenBOM are equations you create in a cell which performs simple arithmetic operations using the designated cells. The basic principle to understand is that a formula equation is in the usage of properties as parameters for the formula. The formula is always defined in the context of a specific line (Item). So if…
The user-defined view is a powerful mechanism that allows you to provide a custom way to present data. You can think about “raw data” in the way it placed in a BOM and then applying view (eg. Engineering, Manufacturing, Supplier, etc.) A View can be thought of as a lense which the BOM is viewed…
Nothing stands still in this world, change is the only constant. This old pearl of wisdom also applies to engineering and manufacturing. Once something is designed chances are you will keep changing it. Even a new product will sometimes be created as a copy of an existing one with some changes applied. Today, I want…
In this video, I’d like to introduce you to BOM types. There are three fundamental BOM types – Single Level BOM, Multi-level BOM and Flattened BOM (report). Here is a picture that gives you an idea of OpenBOM types. Single BOM is the basic of OpenBOM data model. It is a flat list of items…
Products are getting more complex these days. With an increased demand for high-tech electronic, smart devices and IoT, the number of electromechanical products and products with embedded PCB is skyrocketing. OpenBOM is not for mechanical design product only. We took some for the last few months to think about how to improve our integrations with…
It is 21st century outside and digital transformation is one of the most visible trends outside. However, many companies are still relying on drawings as the main media to pass engineering and manufacturing information between departments. And when it happens, Bill of Materials in the drawing is a critical element of this information. So, it…
Search is an important function in every software these days. At OpenBOM we’re thinking how to get Search done in the way it will help you to find stuff and re-use data. Bill of Materials data is complex, so to have efficient and simple search is important. Today, I want to demonstrate 4 tools in…
One of the most unique features of OpenBOM is to support data sharing and collaboration. Think about something simple and powerful? This is exactly where OpenBOM is aiming with real-time instant data sharing and simultaneous editing. Because of unique data management architecture, you can instantly share OpenBOM bill of materials and catalogs with anybody without…
BOMs and Catalogs are fundamental elements of OpenBOM reference instance model. Think about Catalog as a distributed database of parts, components, assemblies. Every component managed by a company or a team is recorded in catalogs. Bill of Materials manages information about specific products, relationships between components, and assemblies and organizing hierarchical relationships of products –…
You probably heard about OpenBOM Reference-Instance Model already. If you missed that, this is a link to catch up. In a nutshell, Reference-Instance model is an abstraction model allowing to model product structure information combined from references of parts (abstract objects) and their instances (specific instances in a BOM) In the picture below, you can…
One of the biggest dilemmas in traditional PDM and PLM software world is related to relationships between design and Bill of Materials management systems. In a practical sense, these are relationships between CAD and CAD data management (PDM) from one side and engineering and manufacturing planning systems (PLM and ERP systems) managing a variety of…
Digital Transformation is one of the fanciest words in a modern lexicon of technologist, strategist and marketing people. Digital is such a sweet word. It makes you feel happy just by saying it. Unfortunately, “digital transformation” marketing gives a false sense of power. It feels like just by saying word digital, companies can transform themselves…
You have asked me about files and how to store them connected to BOM items. Well, here you go! OpenBOM is not your typical PDM system. When we considered how to manage files using OpenBOM OpenBOM gives you some very unique and interesting options on how to connect and manage files using OpenBOM. OpenBOM gives…
The manufacturing industry is changing. A long time ago, manufacturing shops were big and slow. Over the past 15-20 years, the manufacturing industry has discovered contract manufacturing, global market, and many other things that can make manufacturing distributed. You might think that manufacturing companies are all set… The next wave of manufacturing is coming —…
Bill of materials is a recipe of your product. Everything you need to make, purchase, and assembly must be placed in the BOM list. Otherwise, it will be lost, forgotten and ordered late. How to manage the process of purchasing on time? How to keep all suppliers and contractors aligned? Manufacturing companies are continuously asking…
In the world of business software, replacing spreadsheets or Excel is the most popular topic. Guess what? Almost every successful business software is doing something that people were doing and/or still doing with Excel. It is just so easy and natural to start and do Excel. Recently, I was reading my 10-year-old Beyond PLM posts…
One of the most frequently asked questions about OpenBOM is related to multi-level BOM. Does OpenBOM actually support hierarchical multi-level structures? How to create a hierarchical view in the Bill of Materials? I’m not surprised. Hierarchical structures are not very natural for spreadsheets. Since OpenBOM is so much looking and feeling like Excel, then how…
If you visit OpenBOM website for the first time, you might be curious – who is OpenBOM for? The best way to explore OpenBOM is to get to our subscription model, which can give you an idea of how to start using OpenBOM. Let me start by telling our vision: “OpenBOM is for everyone who…
The Bill of Materials (or BOM) is the lifeblood of every engineering and manufacturing process. Regardless of how simple or complex the product is, a BOM is required to define what parts go to manufacturing, what parts are bought or assembled, etc. Because of the high diversity of engineering and manufacturing projects, a BOM can…
On the surface, Bill of Materials (BOM) is simple. This is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Bill of Materials as a list of parts. In fact, BOMs are not simple. Here are just a few ideas about what can make BOM management a very complex task leading to frustration,…
А platform is one of the most popular words in modern software (and not only vocabulary). In the old days, a platform was usually a framework that allowed other applications to run. Think of Windows, Mac/OS, or similar. AutoCAD was a great example of the platform back in 1980s-90s allowing many engineering applications to run…
My attention was caught by the Dragon Innovation article BOM 101. Dragon Innovation is a great company, part of Avnet and providing consulting to hardware startups on how to set up manufacturing in China. In the article, they told about BOM tools and this is the place where I think they got it a bit wrong…
Hello OpenBOM users! I’m very excited about our new website and a new blog. For quite a long period of time, I’ve been blogging on OpenBOM Medium blog entirely. We will continue blogging there, but I’m happy to announce a new OpenBOM blog. This blog will allow all members of OpenBOM team to share thoughts,…
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