Streamline your Solidworks BOM with OpenBOM’s Contextual Navigation

Oleg Shilovitsky
Oleg Shilovitsky
11 October, 2022 | 2 min for reading
Streamline your Solidworks BOM with OpenBOM’s Contextual Navigation

If you manage Bills of Materials (BOMs) in Solidworks, you know how time-consuming and tedious it can be to keep track of all the parts and components. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to streamline the process? Well, there is! 

With OpenBOM’s contextual navigation, you can quickly and easily navigate between different pieces of product structure. The information you need such as component cost, inventory, supplier, etc. can be easily accessible directly from Solidworks without having to search through endless Excels of data. Let’s take a closer look at how it works.

New Contextual Navigation in Embedded Browser

OpenBOM’s contextual navigation is available via the new OpenBOM explorer browser, which is now embedded inside the flyout panel in Solidworks. When you open an assembly in Solidworks, BOM is instantly available in the browser – you’ll see a list of all the parts and components organized in a hierarchy. This makes it easy to quickly find the information you need because you can see where each part fits in the overall scheme of things. And if you need more detail on any particular part, simply click on it to expand the view and see more information.

But that’s not all! OpenBOM’s contextual navigation also allows you to filter the parts and components by various criteria. For example, you can filter by the supplier, part type, or even price. This is incredibly useful if you need to find a specific part or component but don’t know exactly what it’s called. Just apply the appropriate filters and OpenBOM will do the rest!

Video

Check the video of how you can navigate between assemblies and related BOMs.

Conclusion

OpenBOM lives in the same place where engineers live – in Solidworks. If you manage BOMs in Solidworks, OpenBOM’s contextual navigation can save you a lot of time and frustration. With its intuitive “tree” structure and powerful filtering capabilities, OpenBOM makes it easy to find the information you need so you can get back to work on what’s important. Give it a try today!

REGISTER FOR FREE and start a 14-day trial. 

Best, Oleg

Related Posts

Also on OpenBOM

4 6
11 May, 2026

Twenty years ago, designing a product mostly meant mechanical design. A mechanical assembly captured most of what needed to be...

8 May, 2026

Earlier this week, I previewed CAD File Agent for SOLIDWORKS. If you missed that, check these two articles: Why did...

7 May, 2026

A new kind of experience for engineers who never wanted a PDM system in the first place We Started with...

5 May, 2026

When I left Autodesk, I had a strong gut feeling about where the industry was headed. CAD vendors, I believed,...

4 May, 2026

Engineering work starts with files. CAD assemblies, parts, drawings and other related design files are the foundation of product development....

1 May, 2026

One of the most common questions I hear from engineering and manufacturing teams is simple: how do we move product...

30 April, 2026

There is a moment in every engineering company when Excel stops being a helpful tool and becomes the bottleneck. At...

29 April, 2026

Most engineering teams do not start with a product data problem. They start with a design problem. They need to...

28 April, 2026

Every manufacturing company has a BOM review process. The question is what that process actually catches — and what still...

To the top