Iowa, USA, based Anyglide is a manufacturer of very high-quality, versatile, cargo storage systems for ATV, UTV, Trucks, and other rugged applications. Founded in 2019 by a team of experienced engineers and innovative business folks, the company’s products quickly gained adoption in industrial, public safety, and other applications where function and reliability are key.
As their company grew, Anyglide turned to OpenBOM to bring process improvements to several areas of their business, and it has been our pleasure to partner with them ever since.
“We decided to go with OpenBOM and haven’t looked back!” says AnyGlide CTO, Toby Boogerd.
The implementation was led by Toby, who brought his many years of lean business skills and a sharp eye for opportunity to the OpenBOM rollout.
“We were struggling with everything from part numbers to re-keying data in Excel after Excel just to get a purchase order to a potential supplier,” says Toby, whose team is also responsible for getting component parts in the door.
“Our RFQ/PO process was a data-entry burden and then we had to repeat it when we selected a supplier”.
Even though the Anyglide Engineering team was producing great CAD-based 3D models of their innovative designs, that information was not making its way through the organization.
It wasn’t being leveraged.
Until now, Toby, and Anyglide Chief Engineer Mike DeRuyter, had been trying to solve this seemingly solvable problem, but it wasn’t easy, it still took too much work for inventory, purchasing, and manufacturing tasks to get done.
“I was literally driving home one evening thinking there has got to be a better way”, says Toby.
A quick internet search and he was signing up (online) for OpenBOM.
“After a few hours in the shop the next day, I was telling my colleagues, that this is it, we’re gonna get our time back!”
Mike DeRuyter jumped right in and configured the OpenBOM for Solidworks add-in. “We were easily and repeatedly sending reliable BOMs from Solidworks to OpenBOM”, says Mike. “No re-entry, no Excel ”.
From there, Toby and the team built the vendor lists in OpenBOM and assigned vendors to items.
“Creating orders and PO’s is easy with OpenBOM”, Toby explains. “We had a half-day process of updating our Excel-based RFQ’s with design changes, and now it is literally a button press in Solidworks and we have an updated BOM, next to an Order or RFQ, then purchase orders.”
According to Toby, “OpenBOM at AnyGlide is much more than another subscription product, it has literally been a partnership from the beginning.”
“The onboarding experience with OpenBOM was outstanding, and I have been through several other ERP onboardings in my time.”
As part of their annual Team subscription, AnyGlide had access to the live, customer-specific, OpenBOM onboarding sessions.
“Getting that initial push from the OpenBOM onboarding team was huge”, Toby goes on to say, “The combined consulting on everything from part numbering to Solidworks techniques for manufacturing, the onboarding is hugely helpful. Today when I have a question, I go to the Onboarding content, documentation and/or watch a youtube video”.
“OpenBOM Teams is a great fit for us”.
Anyglide has really hit its run-rate with OpenBOM and is realizing the benefits daily.
According to Toby, OpenBOM has delivered on a number of key goals from the get-go.
“With the tight CAD integration Mike has set up, all design changes flow to the BOM immediately, again, no duplication of work.”
“Our part numbers flow from CAD to OpenBOM and uniquely identify each item”, says Mike.
“For us”, says Toby, the OpenBOM catalog is the power behind our success. We have a single item entry that is reused in every BOM, we tie vendors to items and keep track of cost bracketing in a simple and reliable way.”
“By keeping the cost with the item we can rollup cost in the multi-level BOM for a product total cost. Something that took a lot of time and work in excel and our ERP system and required re-entry. Now with OpenBOM there is no double-entry or triple-entry, ever.”
In the end, by significantly reducing cycle times, OpenBOM has exposed AnyGlide to a make-to-order business they hadn’t originally thought possible.
“Way faster R&D is bringing new business for AnyGlide.”
I asked Toby to sum up his decision to buy OpenBOM….. “we’re loving it”.
To learn more about Anyglide please visit www.anyglide.com
To learn more about OpenBOM please visit www.openbom.com
To learn more about OpenBOM onboarding read our recent blog here: https://www.openbom.com/blog/new-openbom-onboarding-service-will-take-you-from-a-chaos-to-digital-state
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