rf IDEAS is just outside of Chicago, USA, and designs and manufactures contactless authentication devices that deliver computer, print, and scan access management to the workplace, campus, and medical and hospital facilities.
“Our primary use of OpenBOM is with our contract manufacturers”, says Craig Zerwas, the company’s Engineering & Operations manager.
“OpenBOM delivers the proper information to our CMs”, Craig explains, “it’s just that simple.”
rf IDEAS has deployed OpenBOM in an ERP lite role, consolidating all design and manufacturing information into OpenBOM, and making OpenBOM information available to the team.
“Our CMs really enjoy OpenBOM. We create ancillary content like specs and PDFs, and easily link them to the OpenBOM item information for an item or BOM.”
OpenBOM also links to the other company resources.
“We bring information from NetSuite, work instructions to assemble a product and packaging and labels and link them all to a single item in OpenBOM.”
“Before buying OpenBOM, our CMs had to go to many places to find the information needed to manufacture and build our products, or we had to find it for them, a time-consuming task, especially with revisions and ECOs.”
“Now, with OpenBOM, we simply add the CM to our Team and share all drawings, Multi-Level BOMs, item definitions, ECOs, specs, engineering docs, and more all through OpenBOM.”
All employees and CMs go to the same location. OpenBOM is the single source of truth within the company for all things having to do with design and manufacturing.
“Everyone absolutely loves the where-used operation in OpenBOM. You just can’t do a where-used operation in an Excel BOM. It is impossible.”
rf IDEAS evaluated several products before buying OpenBOM, most were “too complicated or took too long to implement” says Craig.
OpenBOM is easy to figure out and easy to use.
According to Craig, “OpenBOM speeds the ECO process and reduces build times. All information is in one place. No emails with the ‘final final final excel attached’, it’s way less confusing for our CMs.”
“Images for BOMs and Items are awesome! We take and put pictures in our Catalogs so the contract manufacturer knows what they are building. We don’t make them visualize it anymore.”
“If I had to say one thing that OpenBOM does for us is reduce mistakes and miscommunication.”
“When we go to a meeting with the CM, the stock answer is, “That’s in OpenBOM!”
To learn more about rf IDEAS navigate here
To learn more about OpenBOM check here.
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