Extending OpenBOM Professional User Subscription With Advanced Purchasing Functions

I often explain what we do at OpenBOM by saying “we build an airplane and fly it at the same time”. The number of features and functions has been growing tremendously since we last defined OpenBOM subscriptions. For the last year, we worked with thousands of engineers and manufacturing companies and we’ve added many new features. Bottom line – we’ve learned a lot. As we did, we came to the point where we want to optimize some of the OpenBOM functionality based on the experience of our customers. 

It is not about BOMs, it is about Time and Money 

Changing people’s habits is hard. Everyone starts from Excel and then hits their limits – it is too messy, it takes too much time and it is not reliable. Even for a single user. We’ve seen it with thousands of examples. Every engineer, small business, or company needs to have a robust and reliable mechanism to manage product data – the catalog of all items, list of vendors and to create product descriptions (bill of materials in the structured way to describe what is included and how to use it). Then you need to manage vendors, cost, and the purchasing process. 

Purchasing Functions For Every User 

OpenBOM gives you a way to do so by combining CAD integrations with flexible and powerful ways to get data in, control BOMs, manage vendors, and create POs. As we learned more about it, we want to democratize this purchasing process for companies of all sizes. We found basic functionality of OpenBOM catalogs and BOM management combined with CAD add-ins and management of vendors and POs needed for everyone to provide a power start. 

To make it happen, we will be expanding OpenBOM Individual User Subscription with additional features and functions to support this purchasing process. 

Starting from January 1st, 2022, OpenBOM individual professional user subscription will include several additional features and functions to help make the purchasing process much easier and more efficient. It will include the following functions. 

1. Creating Orders from Catalogs 
2. Managing PO dashboard 
3. Receive PO functions 
4. Integration with Quickbooks Online

All these functions will empower an individual business user and small manufacturing businesses, startups, NPD process, and prototyping activities. 

Democratize and Scale 

Our vision is to empower small businesses and to provide them with the platform they need to scale their business. The foundation of this process, an individual professional user subscription is a starting point that will help every engineer, prototyping team, hardware startup, and small manufacturing business to organize their data. You can achieve this by getting rid of Excels and streamlining the data handover process from engineering to purchasing. It will save tons of time and money. 

Conclusion 

Starting on January 1st, 2022, OpenBOM individual professional user subscription will include new functionality to help manage ordering and purchasing and connect to finance systems. It will include OpenBOM catalog order functions, Purchase Order (PO) tracking, and integration with finance systems. Later this week, we will make an announcement about OpenBOM subscription prices for 2022 with more details. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is purchase OpenBOM Professional User Annual Subscription, which guarantees you having the new functionality in 2022. 

Stay tuned for more announcements. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our support team. 

Best, Oleg