Four Pillars of OpenBOM SaaS PLM

Oleg Shilovitsky
Oleg Shilovitsky
2 July, 2020 | 3 min for reading
Four Pillars of OpenBOM SaaS PLM

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 been building multi-tenant data management foundation and application helping engineers and manufacturing companies to create Bill of Materials, manage parts, revisions, and changes, perform cost calculations, plan purchases, and create purchase orders. OpenBOM developed a unique data sharing and collaboration features allowing to share data and perform simultaneous editing in a-la Google Sheet way. 

Learn more about how OpenBOM helps thousands of engineers and manufacturing companies to do so by navigating to this link.

Earlier this week, OpenBOM introduced a new set of Change Management functions expanding capabilities to support change requests and approvals workflow. Here is a quick introduction to change management functions. 

By providing change management and change request approval workflow, we finally concluded the implementation of four fundamental pillars of OpenBOM PLM. 

In this article, I want to outline four pillars of the OpenBOM PLM.

1- CAD Add-ins 

OpenBOM provides out of the box CAD add-ins for all major CAD systems (mechanical and electronic design. The CAD add-ins are designed in a unique way to work in a SaaS environment, self-installed, updated, and support streamlining of data extraction from design to create an initial Bill of Materials baseline. These CAD-ins are capable of intelligently recognize the features and functions of the CAD system and performing precise initial BOM creation. Navigate here to check out the quick videos of all OpenBOM of the box CAD integrations and links to download and install CAD add-ins on your machine. 

2- Bill of Materials Model

OpenBOM supports a flexible reference-instance data model to manage BOM and related product information. The key elements of the BOM model are item management (via catalogs) and BOM creation functionality. It allows you to create any BOM and customize and define any data. OpenBOM flexibility allows creating any data elements (properties) on item level as well as on instance level for BOM data. 

Check out here to learn more about it.

3- Revisions

Out of the box, OpenBOM supports automatically capturing of change history and creation of revisions (immutable snapshots). The change history contains all operations that were done in each BOM or catalogs. Revisions are immutable snapshots you can store, navigate, and differentiate. Learn more about Revision mechanism here 

4- Change Management

The out of the box change reviews and approval process allows supporting a formal change management process and to control the way revisions created. OpenBOM allows configuring a routing process with up to three approvals. Check more about it here.

Conclusion 

OpenBOM provides a unique combination of functions to manage all product data and related information such as Items, Bill Materials, Production Planning, Vendors, and Purchasing. The core of the data model is a flexible engine to manage the reference-instance information model. Out-of-the-box CAD Add-Ins allow to connect to design processes. The unique level of data model flexibility allows you to configure data elements and control processes in a flexible way.

We are not done by any means. Read OpenBOM customer reviews on G2 Crowd to learn about G2 PLM Grid and what customers are saying about OpenBOM PLM. More features and functions are added to OpenBOM every month. On the other hand, “Less is More”. PLM is too complex and too expensive for many small and mid-sized companies and all these companies are using Excel to manage the data and processes. We are fixing this problem one BOM at a time. 

Check out how OpenBOM helps thousands of users and manufacturing companies and learn OpenBOM can help you as well.

Best, Oleg @ openbom dot com.

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my Beyond PLM blog and PLM Book website

Related Posts

Also on OpenBOM

4 6
9 July, 2025

A few days ago, I posted an article titled Is your data BOMable?, where I explored the readiness of your...

8 July, 2025

Let’s be honest – keeping track of accurate Bills of Materials (BOMs) is one of the biggest challenges in engineering...

3 July, 2025

Walk into any engineering office today, and you’ll see it immediately: Excel open on someone’s screen. Spreadsheets have been the...

2 July, 2025

Engineers rarely build entirely new products from scratch. Whether designing machinery, electronics, or high-tech projects, most products are evolutions of...

1 July, 2025

At OpenBOM, our vision has always been clear – to create an open and flexible information model, built using modern...

30 June, 2025

At OpenBOM, we know that managing changes is one of the most critical – and often challenging – aspects of...

27 June, 2025

At OpenBOM, we talk to manufacturing companies of all sizes – startups, mid-sized innovators, and established enterprises, and most of...

26 June, 2025

Products are becoming increasingly complex and teams are distributed across geographies. It brings up a question about how to improve...

25 June, 2025

At OpenBOM, we make engineering data accessible to business functions—procurement planning, supply chain management, cost estimation, and more.But to make...

To the top