3 Reasons To Bring Product Data and Process To Cloud

As a manufacturer, you understand the complexities of bringing products to market – from design and engineering to production and sale. You also know how essential it is to have efficient and reliable access to data and processes that enable optimized operations. The cloud can be an invaluable resource for manufacturers seeking better visibility over their product-related activities – but many don’t know where to start or why they should bring data and process storage into the cloud. Here are three compelling reasons why you should consider moving your product data and process storage capabilities online: convenience, cost savings, and scalability.

Cloud Makes Work Environment Simple and More Flexible

Digital transformation is on the agenda list for many manufacturing companies. That was one of the things we captured working with many OpenBOM customers. It’s been a tumultuous few years for the manufacturing industry, but something good has come out of it. COVID made its contribution to help companies to decide they need to start moving into a digital world. The number of companies and engineers that believe that they can live with files on local disks and manage Excel files is massively going down. Companies told us that digital transformation is one of the most important strategies that manufacturers are using to streamline their processes, increase efficiency, ensure sustainability and remain profitable in 2023 and beyond—but how to do so is remaining a big question for many companies. Managing data is remaining one big challenge for manufacturing companies and engineers involved in the design, production planning, manufacturing, and procurement activities.

One of the most visible benefits of the cloud environment is to make work easier. You don’t need to think about how to access data – local drive, network, mobile devices, or different locations. We’ve seen many customers that struggled with accessing data in different places and other devices rather than their main desktop computers. Accessing real-time data was a big problem for companies using on-premise 20-year-old PDM systems.

Therefore OpenBOM cloud service helped these customers to make work easier. Moving product data and related information to the cloud allowed remote work, supports business agility and simplifies access to the information. Cloud Product Lifecycle management is quickly becoming a key for modern distributed product development and manufacturing teams. It is also important for companies looking at how to quickly change suppliers in the current turbulent business world. Such a solution is an example of a service that can help process information easily, to improve customer support, and create a real-time digital thread of information.

Streamline Downstream Product Data With Cloud

Moving product data to the cloud provides significant benefits for companies looking at how to organize seamless access to information. A traditional document-based approach relies on old-fashion “export” functions to store product data in Excel and a variety of local databases. Moving data to the cloud expands the value of data by 1/ organizations of a single source of truth (no more duplicated Excels) and 2/ centralized access to the data downstream (data can be accessed by remote workers, supply chain partners, and customers).

Here is an example from another OpenBOM customer – Tomcar uses OpenBOM To Deliver Full Product Definition Shared Globally With All Company Users and Manufacturing Partners.

“I absolutely love that OpenBOM lets me share accurate, complete BOMs with vendors, partners, customers, my colleagues in Israel, and so many more.”, says Jonathan. “It is great for my team and great for the company. Simply put, before OpenBOM, we did not have a final BOM that was accurate or easy to share”, he says, “We needed a full product BOM which OpenBOM delivered!”

Streamline Process Flow With Cloud

In the same way, placing product data in the cloud can improve the value of the data, by moving processes such as change management, procurement, and contract manufacturing RFQ to the cloud, your organization has a lot of things to gain. Executing processes using cloud services expands the control and provides tools to access them to people outside of the 4 walls of your office. A traditional document-driven “email, spreadsheet, approve” process disconnects the data and activities from a single source of truth and forces people to make decisions based on outdated information. A cloud-based process allows everyone “to stay on the same BOM” and makes decisions based on real-time data. This is where the real digital thread begins and process efficiency is improving dramatically.

We’ve seen examples of customers improving the efficiency of their product development and purchasing processes by 75% as a result of using OpenBOM and other cloud solutions.

“OpenBOM and Onshape combined to reduce the RFQ and PO process by 75% while greatly increasing the quality of the overall activity. The individual RFQ was significantly more accurate and well understood by everyone involved.“

Conclusion:

Moving product and process data to the cloud change your product development and operations dramatically. This is where the digital thread begins allowing streamlined access to information and process to prevent wrong decisions, delays, and mistakes.

REGISTER FOR FREE and start a 14-day free trial to check how OpenBOM can help you.

Best, Oleg