openBoM
Manage Bill of Materials Across Distributed Environments

Despite being of paramount importance in the product based industry, managing a Bill of Materials (BOM) is still a challenging aspect in engineering and manufacturing. The complications increase as BOM lifecycle does not reside in just one system or domain, but in multiple enterprise systems. An erroneous or incomplete BOM can cause lost weeks in a schedule and result in wasted production runs. As organizations expand their business with more innovative products, effectively managing accurate product definitions, including BOMs, have become imperative. “BOMs are the lifeblood of manufacturing. For engineers, BOMs are either in the form of a drawing or a ‘miracle’ inside PLM and ERP systems—ending up as spreadsheets,” says Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO and Co-Founder, openBoM. There is a growing need to interlink BOMs, making them shareable and reference-able in ways that transcend technical drawings. The ability to access information and seamlessly collaborate is extremely important. “Availability of BOM information as well as data handover in a distributed environment led to the conceptualization and creation of openBoM for cloud data management and collaboration,” he adds.

Shilovitsky, along with Co-Founder Vic Sanchez, developed openBoM, a fresh approach to removing the pain of tracking BOM data spreadsheets across networks of engineers, supply chain managers, and contract manufacturers. openBoM takes advantage of the latest cloud technologies to provide a BOM and supply chain solution capable of operating in scenarios different from the typical company focused approach. As a cloud based solution, it offers the quickest ROI for solving manufacturing problems in distributed environments. openBoM provides a very attractive alternative to CIOs looking for an affordable solution to their BOM and supply chain challenges. “We differentiate between existing solutions adapted to new cloud realities and native cloud multi—tenant solutions leveraging modern data management trends,” explains Shilovitsky.

openBoM boasts of an approach that blends the simplicity of Microsoft Excel and data management sophistication, along with simultaneous editing and collaboration that is present in Google spreadsheets. Multi-tenant data management allows users to share data and collaborate seamlessly between organizations and individuals without the need to export/import/sync data.

We have taken great effort in integrating openBoM with design and other enterprise tools

openBoM’s ability to track history and revisions provides a powerful capability to manage data and semantic relationships of BOMs at a very granular level.

The company is adept at getting data out of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) environments, enhancing BOMs, and enabling collaboration while handing over change reports to contract manufacturers. “We have taken great effort in integrating openBoM with design and other enterprise tools,” elucidates Shilovitsky, “to enhance our offering, we are partnering with Autodesk, Siemens PLM, Solidworks, Altium, and Onshape to support CAD system integration with openBoM.” The user experience provided by openBoM is very similar to that of Excel, while extending it with sophisticated invisible data management, real-time collaboration, and integration with mechanical and electronic computer-aided design.

“As part of the future development of openBoM, we will provide seamless integration with catalogs of electronic and mechanical parts, inventory management, configurations, change control and more,” Shilovitsky says, “openBoM subscriptions,” he continues, “are available for direct purchase on our website and also from the Onshape App store for Onshape users.”

As an industry thought leader, Shilovitsky shares information and commentary about engineering and manufacturing software on his personal blog, Beyond PLM (beyondplm.com). He continuously provokes discussion on a variety of topics, and builds relationships with industry experts. Several important trends openBoM is anticipating include One Click Manufacturing, real-time collaboration, enterprise cloud software, and others.

openBoM follows the aforementioned trends accumulating the latest industry vision of simplification, cloud computing, the growing hardware renaissance and distributed manufacturing.