Heads up OpenBOM Roadmap for 2020

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 to streamline their work from initial product design and planning to procurement and purchase order management and communication with vendors. 

As a new year starts, I wanted to come and give you some ideas about OpenBOM development and priorities fo 2020. 

1- User Experience and Performance 

Product performance and scale will be on the top priority list for us. As you probably noticed, we made an infrastructure update in our recent product update as part of the future development and optimization of OpenBOM in 2020. A new item information panel that came recently in OpenBOM will be a foundation of future improvements. A special focus will be on the scalability of structure management and ease of user experience. 

2- Integrated 3D Viewer

The importance of visualization is hard to underestimate. From the early beginning, a visual BOM was a key signature of OpenBOM. We know how important it for our customers. Therefore, we decided to bring an integrated 3D Viewer into OpenBOM to provide even better access to 3D CAD integration and future visual collaboration. 

3- Integrated Storage 

OpenBOM is integrated with cloud storage (eg. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive). However, we found a demand for integrating storage as part of simplification. Integrated storage will not eliminate all existing storage support, but in some situations will be easier (especially for customers looking at how to simplify integration and data management). 

4- Revision Management and Lifecycle 

We are going to take the next step in product structure management and revision control. We are going to expand revision support to product structure by allowing parent-child relationships with revision control. 

5- Purchase Order Management 

OpenBOM Design to Purchase model provides an easy to create a planning (Order) BOM and generate purchase orders based on the vendor assignment. We’ve got tons of requests on how to provide a more robust system and tools to general individual purchase orders from catalogs, track purchase orders, delivery status and more. 

6- Continues improvement of CAD integrations 

OpenBOM CAD integrations are a unique way to connect desktop and cloud CAD tools and generate a connected and updatable product structure. Following our recent update of the Solidworks integration data model, we are going to upgrade all CAD integrations to a new Part Number-driven product structure model and improve the usability of tools. Solidworks and other CAD integrations will get support of integrated 3D CAD viewer.

Conclusion.

This is very early heads up on what we plan to do. As always at OpenBOM, we plan to keep strong relationships with our customers and innovate using cloud technologies and the best integration with engineering and enterprise products. As always, we look forward to your feedback and open communication. 

Best, Oleg @ openbom dot com.

Let’s get to know each other better. If you live in the Greater Boston area, I invite you for a coffee together (coffee is on me). If not nearby, let’s have a virtual coffee session — I will figure out how to send you a real coffee.

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

Read OpenBOM customer reviews on G2 Crowd to learn what customers are saying about OpenBOM. 

Image by Mudassar Iqbal from Pixabay