OpenBOM Use For Education Projects at the University of Wisconsin-Stout 

At OpenBOM we’re proud to support education. We see a huge impact on the usage of modern tools in the educational process. Most of the educational institutions, I know using CAD systems to teach students. However, BOM management systems, PDM, PLM, and other data management tools aren’t that popular. 

There are many reasons why data management tools such as PDM/PLM and BOM management are not used widely in the education system. Among them, I can see the complexity of setup, configuration, availability, and cost. All these factors are playing a prohibitive role and therefore students are settled to use Excel to manage Bill of Materials, calculate the cost, and making reports. 

OpenBOM is a SaaS application and it is completely different from traditional PDM and PLM systems. It doesn’t require setup and installation. The registration is instant and it runs from the browser and integrates with all CAD tools typically used by universities and schools (eg. Autodesk Fusion360, Onshape, SOLIDWORKS, and others). 

Last month, I had the privilege to attend the online presentation of students from the University of Wisconsin-Stout presenting their Industrial Design Projects. 

OpenBOM director of user experience Steve Hess had a chance to discuss OpenBOM usage with the professor Kerstin Nye of University Wisconsin-Stout and the way introduce her students to “real” manufacturing & planning. 

“These are Industrial Design students with an early understanding of the design process. UW Stout’s iD program looks to enhance how we teach with real-world experiences such as having students create a Bill of Materials for their product designs” Kerstin explains.

Check the full story of The University of Wisconsin-Stout is using OpenBOM for Industrial Design Class. My favorite passage is the following: 

“The Solidworks/OpenBOM works seamlessly.  I never knew it was possible to build and update a BOM so easily from Solidworks” he said.  “Near the end of the project, I was constantly making revisions and clicking Update BOM to send last-minute changes to OpenBOM”.

Conclusion

It is absolutely essential to introduce students to proper tools that can help them not to spend their time on Excel data management and focused on learning design and how to set up the right processes. 

OpenBOM would play an important role in each design as students, many for the first time, selected specific manufacturing information about the bits-and-pieces of their design.

If you’re a student and interested in using OpenBOM for your education project, you can get a FREE educational subscription for OpenBOM professional user subscription. If you’re professor or lecturer teaching classes and looking at how to get your class involved in BOM collaboration and data management, you can get FREE OpenBOM Professional Team subscription. 

Please reach out to support [at] openbom [dot] com to get the subscription.

Best, Oleg @ openbom dot com.

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