Company Subscription – Managing Part Numbers and Data Sharing With Contractors and Suppliers

How to manage Part Numbers? These simple questions usually raise tons of debates in the community of people working on engineering and manufacturing software.  There are different levels of complexity. Check my articles about part numbers and specifically the last one about 4 reasons why companies are still using intelligent part numbers. 

At OpenBOM, we have developed a very flexible mechanism to manage item databases and part numbers. You can automatically generate part numbers, but also can free type it, which gives the highest level of flexibility. OpenBOM catalogs are the mechanism to create a database of items. Keep in mind because of unique data management features and multi-tenancy, multiple companies, teams, and individuals can create catalogs and share them. In such way, you can have catalogs you created to manage items in your company, but also you can have a bunch of catalogs shared by your contractors and suppliers. 

To keep data consistent, OpenBOM provides a mechanism to control the uniqueness of part numbers in the company using “Company catalog” settings. The settings give you an option to select a list of “company catalogs”. OpenBOM will check Part Number uniqueness only for these catalogs. All other catalogs can have any Part Numbers you need. It can be very useful when working with multiple companies and projects. 

Check the following video to get an idea of how it works. 

Conclusion 

OpenBOM flexible catalog management mechanism combined with the capabilities to control the uniqueness of part numbers across multiple catalogs is a way to organize all your items in a distributed shareable database you can use for your products and share with contractors and suppliers. 

Check it by yourself – register to use OpenBOM for free and start a 14-day trial for Company Subscription NOW. 

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my Beyond PLM blog and PLM Book website. Read OpenBOM customer reviews on G2 Crowd to learn what customers are saying about OpenBOM.