Happy message to everyone who is using calculations and rollups in OpenBOM. Actually, who doesn’t? If you’re new to OpenBOM, check our online documentation for formulas and rollups. The way OpenBOM calculation works is that you can apply formulas to specific columns (or cells), so they will perform as calculated fields. For example, Calculated Cost…
I’m super excited to share some news about the coming new OpenBOM release, which will include new options to stop rollup calculations based on a specific custom condition. Feel confused? Let me explain it from the beginning… Think about a multi-level assembly, which uses some sub-assembly you plan to purchase from the external contractors. A…
New OpenBOM App Extension for Onshape was released just a few weeks ago. If you missed our earlier articles, please check it out here – OpenBOM App Extension for Onshape is available. I’m thrilled to share that we are getting tons of feedback from our customers about the new Onshape application. Check our press release…
Today, I want to give you a quick review of how OpenBOM can help you to keep track of change history, revisions and also manage changes using approval mechanism, In the following video, you can see the OpenBOM automatic history track as well as the mechanism to create a revision (an immutable baseline of the…
In my article today, I will give a quick introduction to OpenBOM calculations and formulas. It is a powerful mechanism, which allows you to perform flat and structured calculations. Examples of calculations – to calculate a total cost of inventory, calculation total mass or total cost of the BOM. Another example of the calculation is…
To eliminate non-value user tasks is the number one priority when it comes to data exchange workflows. It is extremely important in all data handover tasks. At OpenBOM, we create CAD add-in to help users to perform exactly these functions – seamlessly to handover data from CAD design to OpenBOM to create bills of materials,…
OpenBOM catalogs is a distributed database of all items in OpenBOM. When you use OpenBOM, all data is defined in the catalog first. Catalogs help to organize your data, to have your item classification, and to store different attributes with each item depends on its type. Think about Mechanical Items, Electrical, Fasteners, PCBs, Finished Products,…
The data table is a foundation of OpenBOM data management. Different data types are managed using the tables such as the bill of materials, items (catalogs), and others. Each table consists of elements (properties). The user-defined view is a mechanism that allows you to apply a lens to show a subset of objects and their…
OpenBOM looks like Excel, but it is not. Property is a basic building block of OpenBOM data modeling mechanisms. In OpenBOM, you can create a property to represent a single piece of information (eg. Description, Manufacturer Name, Cost, Vendor, etc.). Once a property defined you can use it in other places in OpenBOM (catalogs, Bill…
In this article, I’d like to share a basic introduction to the OpenBOM business process streamlining the data and business handover from design to purchasing and inventory management. The basic elements of the OpenBOM business process are covering the following Managing and exploring the Bill of Materials Managing Vendors Integration with CAD systems Managing Orders and…
Product structures are complex and contain a lot of data – mechanical, electronic software. How to manage it all together, but at the same time to allow us to access the data in a simple and easy form? This is what OpenBOM BOM types can help you to do. OpenBOM BOM types are predefined representations…
One of the most powerful features of OpenBOM is to share and collaborate. OpenBOM allows you to share (automatically and manually) the data and to make it accessible by multiple users at the same using the familiar paradigm from Google Docs and other web applications. OpenBOM unique data management architecture gives you an instant share…
Manufacturing companies need to streamline their product development process, but they are unfortunately stuck in Excel to manage BOMs, change processes, and share data using various tools such as cloud file sharing and email transfers. OpenBOM SaaS PLM platform gives these companies a way to transform their processes, to manage data, integrate with engineering and…
These three topics are usually complex and can be confusing, especially for non-sophisticated users. In my blog today, I want to share the basics of what concepts such as product structure, item, reference, instance and give you some examples from OpenBOM. I will talk about what we do today and we’re planning to do in…
In this OpenBOM 101 video, you can get an idea of how OpenBOM manages data about Items (Parts, Materials, Assemblies) as well as Product Structures (Bill of Materials). OpenBOM fundamental data objects are items, catalogs, and the Bill of Materials. In the following picture, you can see one example of the relationship between Catalogs and…
OpenBOM New user interface is available now and I could not resist creating a new video to show you how to start using OpenBOM and create a new BOM from the beginning. It is not a marketing video, it is a step by step instructions helping you to get started. Here are 7 steps to…
At OpenBOM we’ve been working with Onshape from the first day Onshape App Store was created. Since that time, we always looked for the best way to integrate the data handover between applications to ensure seamless workflow for users creating Bill of Materials, collaborating between designers, contractors, and suppliers. When we introduced OpenBOM Design to…
I’m super excited to share a completely reworked new OpenBOM user interface. We’ve been sharing some early updates about our work on the OpenBOM user interface. It collected tons of feedback we’ve got from users and customers for the last few years. While I can speak a lot about the new user interface, here are…
If you’re using OpenBOM for Onshape, you probably saw a new user interface icon that came recently straight on the right side of the Onshape user interface next to Onshape configuration and other commands. You’re probably wondering what happens? OpenBOM is in the process of the rollup of a new application extension for Onshape (OpenBOM…
Production planning, procurement, and purchasing are age-old problems. But these days, these problems have new solutions, thanks to all the digital technologies we are developing. At OpenBOM we are dedicated to solving problems of purchasing and procurement by providing a product-driven solution. The planning (Order) BOM is a foundation of the purchasing process. We re-assure…
I’m excited to introduce a new OpenBOM partner – Neel SMARTEC Consulting located in Tamilnadu, India. Neel SMARTEC Consulting helps SME’s to stabilize their Product Development Process through Manufacturing using OpenBOM PLM. SME companies demand PLM solutions that are different from old legacy on-premise systems. Bill of material (BOM) is the blood of all manufacturing…
Every manufacturing company is buying parts and outsource some work to contractors and suppliers. Although the process is pretty straightforward, it is not as simple as it might sound. Let’s be honest, the procurement doesn’t sound fancy as a design process, but if it is not done, your shop, team, or company will be delaying…
Kevin Kennedy of Product Design Online put together a very nice tutorial about OpenBOM for Autodesk Fusion 360. The tutorial – Fusion 360 for Woodworkers: parts list with dimensions – automate it! gives you a detailed breakdown of steps on how to setup OpenBOM for Autodesk Fusion 360 from Autodesk App Store, configure parameters and…
Production planning can be thought of as the process, end-to-end, of using your BOM to buy the parts you need. The goal of the purchasing process is to create purchase orders that can be used to order standard components and sub-contractors’ work to build the product. Think of them as documents your company will be…
One of the most often asked questions about BOM management is how to create and maintain multi-level BOM. This question is also hard because the management of structures (or multi-levels) is the moment of time when you should finally realize that your beloved Excel spreadsheets won’t work for you anymore. In this webinar, we are…
Every manufacturing company is buying parts and outsource some work to contractors and suppliers. Although the process is pretty straightforward, it is not as simple as it might sound. Let’s be honest, the procurement doesn’t sound fancy as a design process, but if it is not done, your shop, team, or company will be delaying shipment…
The Bill of Materials is a simple list of parts. This is what I’ve heard from engineers for many years. While it is a truth when you need to manage it, things can get a bit more complex. At OpenBOM, we are taking on a missing to make things easier for engineers and companies to…
The Bill of Materials is the most fundamental part of any PLM solution. Therefore, when designed OpenBOM, we paid special attention to how to create a model to hold product data (Bill of Materials) and to make it flexible and extendible. The data management architecture of OpenBOM is built using flexible data objects holding different…
What can be a better way to learn and start using OpenBOM by exploring a demo data set OpenBOM provides you immediately. Here are 5 steps to do as soon as you Sign-up to OpenBOM and get to the OpenBOM dashboard. 1- Search and Open Bill of Materials with Wireless Router (created from Solidworks) Full-text…
The terminology sometimes can be confused. Multi-level BOM, Product Structure, Indented BOM, Parent-Child Relationships. All these names mean basically the same thing but can come in different variations and flavors of descriptions. How OpenBOM manages product structure and relationships? OpenBOM core data model is capable to manage the parent-child relationships. OpenBOM has a sophisticated data…
The engineering bill of materials (EBOM) is a special BOM, which is used by the companies to define all products of how the product is designed and includes all technical specifications of the products. There are so many definitions of EBOM. You can check some of them in my Beyond PLM blog here and here.…
Terminology is everything. Ask two engineers a question and, if you’re lucky, you will get three answers. But don’t be surprised if you will get more. All names I mentioned in the title of this blog means basically the same thing, but engineers call it differently. Product Structure In my experience, product structure is the…
One of the reasons everyone likes Excels and other spreadsheet applications is because of their simplicity. You can open it and type whatever you need, adding columns, copy/paste, making formulas, and doing other things. Our vision at OpenBOM was to create a simple way to manage product information and bill of materials yet to avoid…
In my blog today. I want to talk about the basics of how to manage information in OpenBOM. And basics of OpenBOM is about how to create a product BOM, to manage parts, and add them to the BOM. Remember, simplicity is of of the most important elements of OpenBOM. We know how important to…
Autodesk Fusion 360 users, I have great news for you. A new OpenBOM add-in for Autodesk Fusion 360 is coming and this is one of these releases I was waiting for a long time. Earlier this year, we introduced a concept of one-click CAD integrations. It was the outcome of our work with many customers…
We are working on a new OpenBOM user interface. I had a chance to give you my early heads up about this project in our blog. If you missed that, please check out this article – New OpenBOM UI/UX. Today, I want to share the very first video of the new OpenBOM look and feel.…
Is your company ready for BOM Management? Do you think it is a funny question? Not really… Many companies, especially in the early stages of its development, prone to the illusion of BOM that needs to be done once to list part in the product and place it on the drawing or to keep it…
In this video, I will show you how to use different units of measures in BOMs and purchasing orders (POs) using OpenBOM. This situation is usually happening with materials and consumables (eg. wood, pipes, metal, food ingredients, etc. A typical scenario is a BOM with a unit of measures (eg. tsp) is different from the…
This week’s webinar is about my favorite topic – the core data model of OpenBOM called Reference-Instance Model, which allows managing product data and product structure in the most simple, yet powerful and reliable way. There are 5 lessons in this webinar: Lesson #1 – Let’s make a BOM of parts? (two skateboards, 4 and…
One size doesn’t fit all. TechClarity Ebook educates are about Engineering vs Supply Chain centric PLM systems. Engineering-centric companies may value deeper capabilities like CAD integration from traditional solutions hosted on the cloud. Supply chain-centric companies likely favor agility and collaboration from newer cloud-native solutions. Today’s supply chain volatility and supplier-centric collaboration processes turn the…
Questions about data are one of the most important in the modern business world. For all businesses, the data quickly becomes a new “digital oil”. Data is one of the most burning questions. In the pre-digital age, data management platforms served one single function – to control data access and ensure the right data is…
Our next educational webinar is about OpenBOM for Autodesk Inventor. OpenBOM Director of User experience Steve Hess takes you through simple to advanced BOM methods using OpenBOM for Autodesk Inventor. Please bring your questions and join the call. We will cover simple BOMs, Multi-Level BOMs, items management, the specific Autodesk Inventor settings which govern BOM…
OpenBOM continues to recognize the needs of individuals involved in makers communities, manufacturing enthusiasts, retired professionals doing homework, and other non-commercial users. With this release, we are adding a Free subscription for qualified non-commercial users. Non-commercial applicants must meet a few requirements which I have highlighted in the form below. So, from now, you can…
I’m very excited to give you an early preview of what is coming for OpenBOM Onshape customers – OpenBOM App Extension for Onshape. OpenBOM has a completely integrated product with Onshape for the last three years. We gathered a lot of information and experience working with manufacturing companies using both Onshape and OpenBOM. We’ve been…
I’m excited to announce the next week’s OpenBOM educational webinar. After the huge success of the series of webinars about Solidworks BOM management best practices (check them out in our Online Training Library Webinars section), we are moving to the next topic and we will cover OpenBOM Best Practices for Autodesk Inventor. Please join OpenBOM…
I’m happy to give you a heads up about the new OpenBOM demo data set is coming very soon. With the introduction of fully automated instant 14-days trial, we realized the importance to provide an environment to discover all available OpenBOM features. The best way to do so is to experience OpenBOM features using the…
The final (part IV) webinar from the series of OpenBOM Best Practices for Solidworks speaks about bill of materials (BOM) maintenance, which includes lessons about how to manage changes in CAD design, update and revision bill of materials, and in general all changes you need to make in SOLIDWORKS and BOMs. There are 4 lessons…
Suppliers and contractors are an essential part of your product development and manufacturing processes. The time when an entire product was designed and manufactured in a single place is gone forever. These days, an average manufacturing company will have dozens and sometimes hundreds of suppliers and contractors. I’ve learned that when it comes to efficient…
If you followed our webinar sessions, I’m sure you attended a series of best practices webinars about how to use OpenBOM with Solidworks. Check them out in our Online Training Library. Check for the Webinars section. Our webinar this week is Part IV of OpenBOM for Solidworks. The webinar will focus on how to maintain…
The last six months of COVID19 exposed one of the biggest challenges of many supply chains – to sustain large-scale disruptions and to provide flexible and fast adaptation to new product development and manufacturing conditions. While many manufacturing companies suffered closures because of lack of supplies, others suffered from their lack of new sources to…
If you ever studied programming language, you’re familiar with this “Hello World!” program. It is usually the simplest program you can think about to produce something that it works – literally printing “Hello World!”. When I first learned C programming language, I remembered my Hello World program. #include <stdio.h> int main() printf(“Hello, World!”); } In…
Flexibility is the key to efficient product data management. Therefore at OpenBOM, we developed the most robust and flexible data model to support product information. Watch the video to learn more about OpenBOM data model In this video, I explain 2 fundamental elements of OpenBOM: – Items – Bill of Materials. An item can…
Unless you lived under the rock for the last several years, you’ve heard about Digital Transformation and Digital Thread. While we are all excited about the power of digital technologies, I often see companies are confused about these new things and have a hard time bridging between day to day operations and digital futures. In…
The history of CAD system development counts decades of work done by many vendors. The generation of CAD system development made huge improvements in how engineering work can be done. Data management was for a long time an Achilles heel in CAD systems. Recent cloud CAD improvements took CAD systems to the next level –…
We continue a series of webinars about Solidworks and OpenBOM. In today’s article, we cover part III, which talks about the topic that often drives a lot of questions – configurations and purchased assemblies. In addition to that, I want to remind you that we recently introduced an updated version of OpenBOM Add-in for Solidworks,…
One of the most typical scenarios I can see with many OpenBOM customers is related to management of purchased assemblies in the Bill of Materials. As much as it sounds simple, it is often creates difficulties to users. Such an assembly should be fully detailed in CAD (eg. Solidworks assembly), but at the same time,…
To have the right data shared with the right people at the right time. How many things did you hear this mantra? We all need to have data, but to deliver the data to the right people is hard. People are located in different places, working for different companies, and using different systems. Traditional data…
Solidworks is a de-facto standard for the professional mechanical CAD system (MCAD). If you’re a mechanical engineer or manufacturing company, you most likely to use Solidworks. While Solidworks provides great designing capabilities and a capable set of tools to manage files, to manage Bill of Materials derived from Solidworks data, if you need to make…
Product information is a foundation of design, planning, and manufacturing. How to manage it efficiently? You can easily export data from CAD to Excel, but you will spend a lot of time making updates, especially if you will add more data such as cost, suppliers, planning, and other pieces of information. Data sharing is another…
These days more and more software is available as a service (SaaS). And many engineers and companies are asking the question of how safe these solutions are comparing to conventional systems installed on your company servers or Excel spreadsheets located on your desktop of company servers. The concern about cloud software (SaaS) is much lower…
In my video today, I will explain to you what is OpenBOM in less than two minutes and five sentences. I talk about what is OpenBOM and how OpenBOM can help you to stop using Excel and Spreadsheets to manage Bill of Materials in your company. 1- OpenBOM is an online (SaaS) application. Old on-premise…
Integration with engineering data and CAD systems is a big thing. Think about connecting your CAD design data and to Bill of Materials in the instant and easy updatable data set. This is what we do at OpenBOM. We provide integrations to all CAD systems. You can get out of the box CAD add-ins to…
Are you still using Excel or spreadsheets? Excels are easy to start, but it is very hard to manage. So, you will become Chief Excel Officer to manage all excels and keep them up to date. As a result, you will make mistakes, you will send the wrong Bill of Materials to purchasing, contractors, suppliers.…
Importing legacy data is one of the most painful stages of any business system PDM, PLM, ERP, and practically any other system. To import data is a project that usually underestimated the amount of complexity, data cleaning, data import, and validation. OpenBOM is very different from many other BOM management and PLM systems you know.…
Last week, we had the first webinar in the series of “Best Practices”. We realized the amount of materials to share is large and we want to split it in a series of smaller bite-size webinars. If you missed the last, check it out in the OpenBOM Webinars’ Archive or navigate to this link. In…
OpenBOM helps you to organize information about the product. As much as it sounds simple and obvious, the organization of the data is one of the most important and complex processes to accomplish in the organization. Even the smallest organization with just a few people can create an enormous amount of complexity by not organizing…
How to create BOM for Solidworks? Sounds like a simple question? If you’re Solidworks user, you probably did it many times by creating Excel export. It is simple, but it is a pandora box of spreadsheet BOM hell. A simple process of export creates tons of questions: 1- How to share the file with people…
What is the Bill of Materials? The question is simple, but the answer is not. Asking this question in your team, you can find a diversity of answers and for a big surprise, you find all of these answers correct. Two main groups of people focusing on BOM and materials are engineers and project management.…
At OpenBOM, we put a high priority on mastering the engineering Bill of Materials and helping to build the most efficient path of BOM creation from a CAD system. OpenBOM add-ins for CAD systems combined together with OpenBOM flexible data management platform is a foundation of how OpenBOM streamlines the process of engineering BOM creation.…
Capturing data from CAD design and the creation of the Bill of Materials is a complex process. At OpenBOM, we want to simplify the process. Our CAD integrations are the way to do it in a very simple and streamlined way. If you are not familiar with OpenBOM CAD integrations, check out our training library…
Multi-level BOM is one of the most fundamental functions in BOM management. BOM information is always structured. To manage it is not easy and it brings lot of changes to engineers and all people in the organization. Earlier this week, we had a webinar to talk about the fundamentals of Multi-level BOM management, its role…
Heads up. I wanted to share some news about the coming improvements in OpenBOM user interfaces. Over the course of the last few months, we’ve been talking to many OpenBOM customers that asked us to put an additional focus on OpenBOM graphic design and user experience. We realize that some of the work we did…
One of the reasons companies are stuck with Excel and fail to digitally transform themselves in the modern business environment is a knowledge gap. We found it is very interesting. The information about online is amazing, yet companies are struggling to acquire this information. Thinking about a variety of forms to share knowledge about the…
In this video, I’d like to talk about OpenBOM cloud services. A cloud service is a software service you can consume either via the internet or mobile application or via API (typically REST API). There are tons of cloud services online in consumer and business applications (weather, traffic, stocks, etc.) Cloud services are a term…
It is time to talk about PLM on our OpenBOM blog. I’ve been sharing my PLM experience via my Beyond PLM blog, so it is possible that you’re familiar with my writing and perspective on PLM, engineering, and manufacturing software. If not, please check it out here. For the last few years at OpenBOM, we’ve…
We are continuously working on how to improve online information about OpenBOM to help all our users and customers to learn OpenBOM and get information handy. Today, I’m excited to share with you the information about the major updates in OpenBOM online training library. It is available here. But you always can access it from…
Nothing stands still in this world, change is the only constant. This old pearl of wisdom also applies to engineer 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. I’m super excited…
In this video, I talk about Product Lifecycle Management and how we build OpenBOM PLM differently on pure SaaS foundation. I also, briefly introduce you to a new OpenBOM collaborative change process. Product Lifecycle management for many years associated with large manufacturing companies and management of complex processes from early ideation and design to final…
Everyone needs data, but nobody wants to manage this data. When it comes to data-driven processes, the ability to populate the data needed for product design, production planning, and purchasing is next to none. Manufacturing companies are looking at how to establish a repeatable process for setting up product structure, making cost assessments, purchasing planning,…
In this video, I discuss one of the biggest problems I’ve seen in PLM industry – complexity. Working for 20+ years in PLM, I’ve seen many companies struggling with the complexity of PLM and PDM solutions. So, our vision at OpenBOM was to change the status and democratize PLM systems by following these 3 steps: …
The article gives you the fundamentals of the OpenBOM purchasing process. Check it out first. In this article, you will learn the details and best practices of managing Order BOM and planning to purchase. You will also learn how to manage Items data using OpenBOM catalogs and create vendor lists including Approved Vendor List (AVL). …
Designing products is fun. But once you move from the design stage to production, you need to plan production and purchase. And it is very hard to do, even it sounds very simple – count parts, select vendors, organize part lists and purchases. Design data is complex and located in CAD systems that are not…
I’m very much excited about the restarting of OpenBOM webinars. If you never saw OpenBOM webinars before, check it out here. This week, we’re restarting our educational webinar series with a set of webinars about OpenBOM. During these webinars, we are going to give you a deep introduction in how OpenBOM helps you to manage…
One of the big differentiation features of OpenBOM is tight integration with engineering and design systems. By doing so, we ensure the easiest way for data to flow between applications, The CAD system data can be seamlessly extracted and transformed into Bill of Materials and related information. To support CAD integrations, OpenBOM we use continuously…
At OpenBOM we’re proud to support education. We see a huge impact on the usage of modern tools in the educational process. Most of the educational institutions, I know using CAD systems to teach students. However, BOM management systems, PDM, PLM, and other data management tools aren’t that popular. There are many reasons why data…
In this video, we demonstrate how to create a template in OpenBOM and use it in OpenBOM Solidworks Add-in. The idea of templates is about how to deal with repetitive projects you might have in your organization. Let’s say you create a new project using OpenBOM, created Bill of Materials, rollup, calculations, etc. Everything is…
In this video, I can demonstrate how you can move items from one catalog to another catalog in OpenBOM. OpenBOM has a flexible data model. It allows you to adjust the data model (properties in the catalog) when you import data on the fly. Therefore, to move items between catalogs you just need to use…
Earlier this year, we announced a partnership program at OpenBOM for consulting and online services. We have seen the work moving online gradually for the last several years. The last few months of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated a huge demand for online services. By introducing the OpenBOM SaaS application, we realized that there is a…
In this video, I talk about what is OpenBOM and how OpenBOM can help you to stop using Excel and Spreadsheets to manage Bill of Materials in your company. In many ways, OpenBOM is different from old on-premise PLM systems, and many cloud PLM tools available on the market today. Here are the key points…
In my video today, I want to talk about Multi-tenant Architecture, why is it important and it makes OpenBOM different from old PLM architectures. In the old days of PLM, the system architecture was designed heavily based on the database as a foundation of the architecture. A single database was created for each company and…
You need to create a solid foundation to build a house. The same holds true when it comes to managing products, changes, manufacturing, and purchasing. With no good foundation, the solution will be sloppy and unstable. The reason why Excel and spreadsheets based solutions are weak is because they don’t provide a solid function to…
Productivity is one of the most critical elements of efficient data management. Creating data in OpenBOM was always an easy thing to do – import from CAD or import from Excel was as easy as click on the button. Today, I’m excited to share that we’re making the next step in improving import functionality by…
In my video today, I want to talk about simplicity. Many years ago, I had a customer who asked me to pack all sets of complex features we developed for him under a simple button. I did it and we won the deal. Back 20 years ago, I’ve got a strange set of feelings about…
I’m very excited today to introduce you to the next level of CAD integrations we developed at OpenBOM. The code name “one-click” and the goal of this integration to simplify even future the process of configuration, settings, and data extraction. OpenBOM manages a sophisticated data model for engineering and bill of materials data. Check out…
In this video today, I want to talk about the fundamental elements of the Bill of Materials data model and how to manage it in OpenBOM. There are 2 main elements of BOM model: Part (contains information about an abstract part including all attributes such as Part Number, Description, Manufacturer, Cost, Supplier, etc.) It is…
In my video today, I want to talk about CAD integrations and OpenBOM. The importance of seamless integrations between CAD and BOM management environments such as OpenBOM is hard to underestimate. Because of the moment of time, you will start using it, you will save tons of time. You can think, BOM is not a…
I’m very excited to share some initial information about coming new functionality to enhance the Item lifecycle and introducing change request functions in OpenBOM. The functionality is part of our roadmap 2020 and plans for the enhancements in the OpenBOM product lifecycle mechanism. Existing functions include an automatic track of all changes as well as…
In this video, I talk about the Bill of Materials and Purchasing. For many companies a purchasing process is a messy combination of Excels extracted from the CAD system, manually created purchase orders and information about vendors. OpenBOM Design to Purchase process helps you to organize information about the Bill of Materials, Vendors, Cost, and…
Excel is still the most popular application to manage Bill of Materials. Many companies consider Excel as a safe heaven. After all enterprise and business products fail, Excel can do a job. But the thing with Excel is that the visible part of Excel is easy. An invisible part of Excel is the one that…
In this video, I share a story about how OpenBOM helps engineers and manufacturing companies to stop using spreadsheets to manage product data, bill of materials, calculations, and purchasing. This is a visualization of the OpenBOM engineering story you can read here. Here are a few things you will learn from this video: 1- OpenBOM…
A few weeks ago we announced support for Autodesk Fusion360 native table features. If you missed my earlier blog, please check it here – OpenBOM Native Drawing Support For Fusion360. And today, I’m coming again with a piece of early information about new features in OpenBOM for Autodesk Fusion 360. We’ve been working with many…
In this video today, I will talk about how to share data. In our everyday lives, we share data – pictures, documents. But when it comes to product development, to share data is not easy. OpenBOM developed a unique technology that allows you to instantly share product data and all related information. So, your co-workers,…
Getting the right set of properties in the Bill of Materials from the CAD system can be a tricky job. At OpenBOM, we believe in efficiency and productivity as the most important things when it comes to BOM creation and management. So, if you spend less time sorting out properties and data from CAD System…
Imagine you overcome your resistance to change and decided to leave Excel and move to OpenBOM. In this video today, I want to talk about what will happen to you if you do so. If you’re an engineer working on design… You will create automatically Bill of Materials from the CAD system You will import…
In this video, I explain the basics of the OpenBOM purchasing process. Check out our website to learn more about RFQ and Purchasing. OpenBOM helps to connect design and purchasing and streamline the process of ordering based on accurate product information. There are 3 main inputs in the purchasing process (1) Design; (2) Catalog and…
Productivity is a key. At OpenBOM we always looking how to improve the productivity of user workflows. The last release was all about improving productivity and allowing to customers to re-use their work and do it faster and simpler. In this blog today, I’m very excited to share more details about recent enhancements in the…
In this article, I will explain how to manage a situation in which you’re buying materials in one unit and consume it in different units of measures. This is one of the most demanding scenarios and it is very often happening in manufacturing companies. A very typical situation. You buy paint in gallons and consume…
In this video, I talk about how to overcome the resistance to change. The change is one of the hardest things, so when you want to do it, some good practices are needed. At OpenBOM, we learned how to help the moving stage buy stage when changing the way you organize product information and manage…
Productivity is key when it comes to user experience. This is why everyone likes Excels and Spreadsheets in general. It is so easy to edit data, add new information, copy/paste, change, and do many other things. The ease of use comes with the prices of messy data and lost information. When we started OpenBOM, we…
Think escaping Excel BOM management is mission impossible? Think twice, because in this video, I’m going to show you how easy to do it in OpenBOM. In my demo today, I will show you how to grab a BOM from your Google Sheet, split it into 2 pieces, import item information to create the OpenBOM…
In this video, I’m talking about CAD integrations transformation. Traditional CAD integrations are focusing on how to manage files on PDM vaults to get control of storing files, managing versions, and access by engineers. At OpenBOM we created a set of very unique CAD integrations focusing on extracting data from CAD files in a granular…
CAD systems and files are one of the most sources of information you can get data to start creating Bill of Materials, to build a database of items, find information about suppliers, and many other things. Therefore, at OpenBOM we strategically position ourselves to build the best in class CAD integrations capable to extract all…
In this video, I talk about how to stop using Excel and move to OpenBOM. In fact, most of engineers and companies I meet are convinced that Excel is not good, but they scary of making a change. Excel (or spreadsheet) looks like something they familiar with even it is very bad and leads to…
In my previous article Graphs, Networks, and BOMs Part One and Part 2 I introduced how Graph and Networks can be used to represent Bills of Materials and how data can be aggregated from multiple BOMs in a single network. The aggregated graph structure is a very important asset that can be used for future…
This is part 3 of my video blog about how OpenBOM can help to Engineers. Today, I will talk about how OpenBOM can help you to generate and share files attached to BOMs. In the previous videos, I explained how OpenBOM can create BOM automatically from the CAD system and keep it in sync. Also…
Quick preview of a new and powerful feature – formulas in the catalog. Our customers asked us about these formulas a long time ago and we are happy to bring it to OpenBOM. It will be coming int the next release. The functionality of the formulas in the catalogs are very similar to Bill of…
In this video, I talk more about how OpenBOM can help engineers by organizing calculations, rollups, and managing item data in central catalogs. In the previous blog, I explained how OpenBOM allows you to create a BOM from every CAD software using unique plug-ins optimized to extract the Bill of Materials and share it downstream…
I want to share great news – we just released a new version of Autodesk Fusion 360 add-in. We’ve been working on this release for quite some time. It contains several important features. The first and the most important one is support for Autodesk Fusion 360 Drawings. In the era of 3D CAD, drawings still…
Everything starts with a design. If you design a new product or change an existing product, it will be a moment when you will need to create a Bill of Materials and send it to production planning or procurement. There are many ways to do so, but to create Excel would be a straightforward way…
To say customers are important is probably to say nothing. What is extremely important is to understand customers, to understand how they think, what they feel, how they react and what they really need. It takes time, effort, and persistence. Over the course of the last four years, I talked to thousands of manufacturing companies,…
In my previous article Graphs, Networks and BOMs Part One I introduced how Graph and Networks can be used to represent Bills of Materials. Bill of Materials usually presented as lists of parts and assemblies that actually can be transformed into a very sophisticated and intelligent network structure. Using graph data representation, the theory of…
In this video, I speak about goals. We all have goals… like waking up Monday morning and promise to exercise every day or don’t eat after 6 pm. Today, I want to talk about BIG GOALS. I was inspired by Jim Collins’ book Build to Last. If you had no chance to read it, the…
In this video, I speak about why we started OpenBOM and what is the foundation of OpenBOM vision and strategy. A short summary of my points: 1- How companies and teams work together – everything is connected and distributed. 2- Technology and PLM system architecture – from a single database to multi-tenant systems 3- Intelligence…
It is a very strange time. Social distancing. You can save the world by staying at home. We are afraid to meet people, we are afraid to make contacts. And we work from home. Interesting, it was always true for the OpenBOM team. We are a virtual team and company. But now it feels different…
Ask anybody about a bill of materials and the answer will be – this is a list of parts you need assembly the product. I’m going to change your perspective on bill of materials in these three articles. I’m going to introduce you to the intersection of three topics – the Bill of Materials, Graphs,…
OpenBOM provides unique multi-tenant data management technology and out of the box process to communicate between engineers, purchasing planners and production. Real-time simultaneous collaboration and flexibility, combined with support for CAD and integrations, out of the box formula and calculations process can give you a way to transform the processes in a matter of days.…
A spreadsheet was never built for PLM, BOM management, and collaboration. In a typical process of connecting engineers, contractors, production planners, suppliers, and contract manufacturers, the Bill of Materials is the lifeblood that allows this process to keep going. The process is not simple and can bring many challenges. When Excel and email are the…
OpenBOM engineering integrations are the foundation of data you can use to build a product structure and connect all related information to it. Each CAD integration with OpenBOM is built using specific needs and supports user cases and workflows for each CAD system. I’m excited to share our next improvements in supporting Autodesk Fusion 360…
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 software is a complex discipline that requires some educating, knowledge gathering,…
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 the 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…
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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