MICRO Is Building A Fleet of 6-foot Tall Museums Using OpenBOM And Autodesk Fusion 360

MICRO
MICRO

Their team of scientists, designers, engineers, and storytellers take a vast, complex world, and squeeze it down into boxes the size of vending machines and all of us at OpenBOM are excited to be part of it!

Founded in 2016, the company sits at the corner of Cook and White streets in Brooklyn, New York, and literally produces a complete, interactive, educational museum that can be located anywhere…

Tim Corbett is in charge of manufacturing at MICRO and part of a team responsible for a product that may seem mild-mannered but at the core is a completely custom mechanical, electrical, graphic, and very digital design. Dan, Juna, Jenna, Manny fill out the Product team and are all equally responsible for the museum’s success.

It was this commitment to the team that brought MICRO to OpenBOM.

Tim, who has a strong background in product and design, brought OpenBOM to MICRO as part of his effort to professionalize the product definition and likes how OpenBOM collaboration functions empower his existing Autodesk Fusion 360 workflows and designs.

“My Team collaborates with a lot of people as we go through the design and manufacturing process, we have a highly distributed team so the SaaS OpenBOM architecture fits nicely within our framework,” he says.

MICRO drives its design from Autodesk’s Fusion 360. The OpenBOM for Fusion 360 add-in enables the team’s success in many ways.

“My team is multi-disciplined from the get-go!”, Tim says. “We have multidisciplinary BOM comprised of hardware, graphics, [Fusion] PCB, fasteners and common off the shelf parts, and a wide range of materials, supporting in-house and outsourced manufacturing.”

In fact, MICRO co-founder Amanda Schochet gave a Ted Talk on just that topic:

Tim Corbett“OpenBOM was our first choice,” says Tim.

“The OpenBOM product and team made the choice easy. We considered Airtable, it was nice looking but lacked the design, manufacturing, and BOM functions we get with OpenBOM.”

“OpenBOM lets us focus on the design while letting the tools do the work”, he says.

“The value of OpenBOM comes through in the reliability of the automation. It allows us to punch well above our weight in terms of data management. Our creative process builds complex assemblies with a lot of deferred technical debt. We pay off that debt with OpenBOM”

MICRO puts a lot of value on the OpenBOM for Fusion 360 integration.  

“The Fusion 360 extractor is the closest thing to magic we have. I click BOM and all my parts and quantities and descriptions and structure come to the BOM. Plus, we get accurate shaded images right into the BOM for every item. We didn’t expect the huge value we receive from simply putting images in our BOMs. Everyone loves it!”

Of course, the proof is in the efficiency gained.

“Literally every BOM build from Autodesk Fusion 360 saves me hours of data entry!”

As the company matured, MICRO’s products became more complex and the BOM extraction became more important. 

According to Tim, they had moved past the point where they could create a trustworthy BOM by hand and needed a sturdy structure in place when it was time to buy parts.

“Our existing toolset just wasn’t working anymore,” he says.

“Today, OpenBOM gives me the confidence to know we are not committing some glaring oversight, our build times have compressed, update and validation of BOMs drive optimization.”

MICRO and Tim in particular also enjoyed the personal, professional, touch they received from the OpenBOM staff.

“Honestly, it was about the OpenBOM support – pre and post-sales,”, he says. “As we got deeper into the technical tasks and processes at MICRO the OpenBOM team was generous with their time, even when the discussion was much more about our own internal process.”

Tim wanted to be sure we understood one other unexpected benefit, “a visual BOM, allows me to communicate much more effectively to my company leadership. I can show the unpacked state of the project in slack or on web-calls to quickly communicate the state of the project. All made possible by the low-friction thumbnail generation from Fusion.”

“In this sense, OpenBOM serves as much as an internal marketing tool for me as it does a manufacturing tool.”

We are looking forward to the next amazing 6-foot tall museum from MICRO.

To learn more about MICRO please visit www.micro.ooo

To learn more about OpenBOM please visit www.openbom.com

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