BOM as a Service

Manufacturing companies are looking to the cloud as a way to improve their operations and achieve digital transformation. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the cloud offers several benefits that can be tailored to specific needs. With the right planning, manufacturing companies can make the most of this transformative technology.

What Analysts Are Saying?

According to Gartner’s  Hype Cycle for Manufacturing Digital Optimization and Modernization 2021, 5-20% of PLM businesses will switch to cloud-native systems in the next 2-5 years. This is a pretty big number and a lot of money. The size of the PLM market in 2021 grew up double digits (see my comments from the CIMdata Industry event earlier last month) and jumped to $59B. 

Cloud and digital wins. It was predicted by many, but the timing is right now. 

The last 10 years were the time when active debates happened around the question if engineering and manufacturing software should (or should not) adopt cloud technologies. The time has changed and manufacturing companies are actively moving to the cloud. Jim Brown of TechClarity put it very nicely in his research article:

Times have changed. We’ve seen a shift from companies questioning if they should use the cloud to asking “why not?” use the cloud. Many viewed slower cloud adoption for PLM and other engineering solutions as a reluctance to put IP in the cloud, but our research and experience point to another reason. The solutions available on the cloud versus more traditional deployments simply did not offer equivalent capabilities. Now, we’re seeing a different mindset.

Another article, also by Jim Brown, but now writing for Siemens PLM article shows where he can see the value of the cloud solutions.

From Data Management to Online Service

Modern software is changing the paradigms of how vendors are developing software and how IT systems are delivering them to the customers. What we knew before as a “data management system”, now is provided as a service and can be consumed by customers. The biggest providers of services are larger infrastructure companies such as Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (GCP) and manufacturing companies are looking at them as platform providers. However, the platform must provide a set of services and this is a place where PLM digital transformation rubber “hits the road”.

Modern cloud-native systems play the role of “services” that can be available on-demand from these platforms to solve problems. These new services are compatible (thanks to REST APIs and cloud technologies) and can be recombined together to build solutions. Think about multiple database services (eg. RDS), analytics (Machine Learning and AI services), and others. 

Modern PLM environments will become services too. And this is how OpenBOM is coming with our Subscription Model and quickly becoming a “BOM service” that can be available from AWS and other cloud platforms.  

Online Service and Future Manufacturing Intelligence 

Data is the foundation of future manufacturing intelligence. One of the powerful business trends these days is to help businesses to leverage their data to help to make the right decisions. Speed and cost are two factors that are most critical for all manufacturing companies these days. So, called on-demand manufacturing models are growing out of the space of the intersection between the company data and global online platforms. It is like Airbnb helps you to find the right apartment when you travel, online manufacturing services can use data to help you to find the right manufacturing options, contractors, and suppliers. 

OpenBOM BOM service is a future option to get an online platform to generate the BOM out of your data, form the order and help you to plan and fulfill your order using services provided by contractors and suppliers. 

Conclusion 

OpenBOM provides an online BOM service that helps you capture engineering information, analyze it, calculate the cost, and help source and manage POs. At this point, OpenBOM is a powerful utility service that helps you collect information from multiple disciplines and connect them to a single source of truth for your project or production plan. Within time, BOM service will become smarter and will use OpenBOM platform intelligence to give you recommendations on how to optimize your sourcing and procurement. 

REGISTER FOR FREE to check how OpenBOM can help you today. 

Best, Oleg