OpenBOM Calculations & Rollup Improvements: The Key To Cutting Cost & Staying Organized

The old saying…”Time Is Money” has never been more true than when you are in the process of product development.  

Every single minute that is mismanaged takes away from your business’s bottom line. In general, Design has a significant monetary impact on the entire product development outcome. 

The ability to predict and fix things early on in the design process can help significantly develop a product with the desired cost, mass, quality, and other parameters reflecting the product requirement. 

Where Are The Savings? 

If I were to tell you that there was a tool out there that was capable of making early calculations related to your product development process that can drastically cut down on your cost, how excited would that make you?  

I’m pretty sure you’d be elated!

The thing is, there are so many engineers and product development organizations that rely solely on Excel spreadsheets to make the early Bill of materials and to manage product data – items and their attributes such as cost, supplier, material, manufacturer, and many others. 

I’m here to tell you that this form of management is outdated and can be costing you big in the long run.  

So What’s The Solution?  

Calculations and formulas are tough. I’m not talking about the SUM function in Excel. That one is easy. Imagine, you have an indented structure and you need to rollup the cost of the product or to calculate the cost of a specific component in all assemblies. In this case, Excel is not your good friend and will come up short in providing you a solution. 

At OpenBOM, we provide an easy and reliable way to add any data properties and also control how to calculate various things. For example, to rollup cost. OpenBOM automatically calculates the value (eg. Cost) and rolling up the values between sub-assemblies. It is all done with the formula builder. 

But Wait! There’s More…

In a new OpenBOM release, we are expanding rollup formulas to support a very popular Flattened BOM. Check our documentation for information about BOM types. 

In this short video, I made a preview of the new feature related to formula and calculations – support rollups in the flattened BOM need.  

Flatted rollup formula rollup support will allow you to see a granular rollup per each component type across multiple assemblies. In other words, it will sum up all instances of the same item in the BOM and then make the calculation based on these numbers. The feature is expected to roll out in the next OpenBOM release. Stay tuned…

Conclusion 

OpenBOM’s flexible and robust formula and calculation support allow engineers and manufacturing companies to perform an early assessment of the product characteristics (eg. Cost, Mass) and speed up the development process.

New rollup functions coming in the next release will make the process more granular and efficient allowing you to slice and dice cost based on the different components in your product. 

Check it out today – register to OpenBOM for free and start your FREE 14-day professional subscription trial. 

Best, Oleg