Heads up: OpenBOM Company Subscription 

Since the very early days of OpenBOM, we’ve been focusing on how to help engineers and teams to work together. OpenBOM unique real-time collaboration and sharing helps people working on the same project, product, Bill of Materials to share data and exchange information. 

At the same time, we are continuously learning new things from our users and customers. For the last several months, we’ve been observing strong demand to improve OpenBOM functions related to governance and team administration. While our vision for OpenBOM Team is to allow a group of people to work together, we believed that there is a place for a new subscription level – Company. 

Here are our initial thoughts about OpenBOM company subscription. The development is undergoing right now and the first set of features will become available in September. This is also a perfect time to give us feedback and share your thoughts. 

Company will grant administrators more governance and control over the company and the users experience. We will also introduce company catalogs to control Part Numbers across multiple catalogs and more. Watch our blog and other posts for more information about it later in August. OpenBOM integration with Quickbooks is still in Beta status. Quickbooks integration and other accounting system integrations will available in Company subscription from September 1st

1- Part Numbers Control 

To control Part Numbering is an important function for every company. The team in OpenBOM can share resources from multiple sources – internal, suppliers, contractors. However, every company would like to have a control for the uniqueness of Part Numbers. To support it, we will be introducing “Company catalogs” with a special check of Part Number uniqueness. 

2- Part Revisions, BOMs and Product Lifecycle

A longer plan for Company subscription is to improve the way OpenBOM manages revisions and BOMs. More functions will be coming to allow to keep relationships between Part Revisions to introduce new part lifecycle schemas and more.

3- Data ownership 

Company subscribers will allow having special data ownership schema and control. Data created by users will be held by a company and in case of the user is leaving a company will be preserved with the company. Also, company admins will have special rights to delete or modify the data created by other team members (eg. delete BOMs). 

4- Company Templates

We are planning to provide better control over templates. A company admin will be able to restrict users to create BOMs and catalogs only by using special Company Templates. It will be also available for regular users and CAD plug-ins. 

5- Accounting integration. 

Some of the OpenBOM integrations (such as Quickbooks and some others) will become available only for Company subscribers. 

Conclusion

Governance, better data control, part numbers, part lifecycle, and lifecycle. This is a shortlist of features and functions we plan to introduce in OpenBOM for the last several months. The first Company subscription will be available soon in September 2019 update. I looko forward to your comments and the feedback. 

Best, Oleg @ openbom.

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