Quick preview of a new and powerful feature – formulas in the catalog. Our customers asked us about these formulas a long time ago and we are happy to bring it to OpenBOM. It will be coming int the next release. The functionality of the formulas in the catalogs are very similar to Bill of…
One more feature request and the way to streamline the process of part creation in OpenBOM. Catalogs are the way to manage Item Masters for all types of parts you have in your company. Think about standard, engineering and any other items. When you create a BOM you can make a selection of existing parts.…
A new feature of Item Master panel is to support multiple catalogs. In the previous release, we introduced Item Master panel – a very easy way to create new items in the catalog directly from BOM. However, if you work with multiple catalogs, you can now select what catalog to use for a new item…
OpenBOM data organization contains Bills of Materials and Catalogs. If you’re not familiar with data modeling in OpenBOM I recommend you to check a few articles to get up to speed. OpenBOM Data Management Fundamentals How Many Catalogs To Create in OpenBOM In some situations, you can create a Bill of Materials from the CAD…
Best practices of Import BOM or Catalog to OpenBOM from your existing spreadsheet The things are rarely happening in the vacuum. Usually, you have already a bunch of data in spreadsheets you want to bring to OpenBOM to keep managing or using this data in the future. What are the most typical use cases? Over…
One of the ways to create a new BOM or Catalog is to create them from scratch. If you skipped the fundamentals of OpenBOM data management, I recommend you to check this out before moving forward. BOM and Catalogs are fundamental elements of data in OpenBOM. Catalog defines a distributed database of all items (standard,…
Colored parts often represent some level of difficulties when you attempt to manage it in Bill of Materials and inventory. Imagine that your company is manufacturing pumps that can be ordered in different colors. You don’t know upfront what color of the pump will be ordered. You can, of course, to define Part Number for…
One of the questions often comes from new OpenBOM users about Catalogs – how many Catalogs should I create? This is a great and important question. So, I wanted to spend some time to give a recommendation about how to organize data in OpenBOM catalogs. In a nutshell, OpenBOM manages data organized as catalog(s) and…
OpenBOM data management gives you a lot of flexibility. While in general, I see it a very good thing and can give you a lot of value really quick, it can be also confusing sometimes. Today, I want to talk about different ways to manage data in multi-level structures and some rules I recommend you…
A few days ago, I wrote an article explaining how OpenBOM is managing the parent-child structure of information in Bill of Materials. If you missed that article check it out. OpenBOM provides a robust and transparent parent-child relationship management systems. It allows you to keep flexible editing mechanisms by typing, selecting and changing of data.…