How To Save Engineering Time?

Time is money. Nobody will argue with that. However, when it comes to engineering, time can be a lot of money. Inefficient engineering processes and data management can lead to mistakes, which will cost even more money moving forward and downstream into organizational processes.

When speaking with engineers and manufacturing companies about the way they work and how OpenBOM can help, one of the ways to emphasize the extreme importance of focusing on data management, collaboration, and information flow streamlining is to think about engineering time. 

How Engineering Time Is Wasted?

The common denominator of everything you spend in engineering is time. With inefficient data management, you’re spending this time creating Bill of Materials in Excel, ensuring everything is exported, sending these Excel via email, and updating them all the time when you need to make any change. Besides that, you spend time copying data from one Excel to another when the data must go between organizations and be reformatted for different tasks. 

Here are three main sources of waste that can happen with organizations when using inefficient data management and keeping Excel around you:

1. Generate Bill of Materials and all related data from CAD environment 
2. Merge changes, copy / paste data between different files 
3. Keep the history of what was done in the past to ensure the traceability 

At OpenBOM, we focus on providing a data management environment and the functionality of the system to save you from wasting engineering time by providing a seamless data management layer, automatic data generation from the CAD environment, and a full history of changes. 

Now let’s move from the theory to some cool customer examples of how OpenBOM helps to save time and a lot of money. 

G2 2021 Fall Award 

Earlier today, we announced the recent achievements of OpenBOM, which was awarded multiple G2 awards acknowledging OpenBOM customer loyalty and innovative customer-focused product development. Check out our press release here. OpenBOM continues accelerated growth during the first three Quarters of 2021 more than doubling its sales in 2021 compared to the same period of the previous year.

OpenBOM awards include the G2 Best Relations Fall 2021, G2 Most Implementable Fall 2021, and G2 Momentum Leader Fall 2021 for PLM Software G2 Fall 2021 Report. G2 Crowd is the world’s leading business solutions review website. G2 is the world’s largest B2B marketplace and the source of social reviews for business software. G2 Grid report reflects customer feedback to rank the best business software in each category.

OpenBOM is earning top approval ratings in all leading categories of the software comparison in the category of Product Lifecycle Management Software Quality of Support (92%), Ease of Use (83%), Meet Requirements (83%), Ease of Admin (84%), Ease of Doing Business with (90%), Ease of Setup (81%). The highest-rated features of OpenBOM are Multi-Level BOM (89%), CAD (89%), BOM management (86%).

Recent Customer Stories 

Read the recent OpenBOM customer stories speaking about how OpenBOM helped these companies save time and resources. 

OpenBOM Helps Kapsch BusinessCom To Manage Sales Process For Configurable Custom Developed Products Reducing Engineering Time by 30%, Read the full story here.

Roland Ambrosch is the company’s Head of Digital Factory and mentions that by utilizing OpenBOM’s template feature, Kapsch can ensure they include every single line item in a product BOM from the start, then configure it for the customer’s specific needs. The templates allow us to prepopulate the standard product definition in the BOM, then scale and configure for our specific customer needs,” says Roland. “It greatly reduces errors, saves a tremendous amount of time, and ensures that we always provide an accurate pre-sales quote to the customer.”

Iowa, USA based Anyglide Improves Engineering, RFQ, and Purchasing Processes Using OpenBOM. Read the full story here.

“Our RFQ/PO process was a data-entry burden and then we had to repeat it when we selected a supplier. 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 AnyGlide CTO, Toby Boogerd, whose team is also responsible for getting component parts in the door. “We decided to go with OpenBOM and haven’t looked back!”

Questum E-Mobility Uses OpenBOM to Convert Medium Sizes Trucks From Diesel To Electric. Read the full story here.

“Our product is complex,” explains Elias. “As our company and offerings grew, management of all these parts was becoming a burden. We had started with Excel and quickly realized that was not going to scale. OpenBOM was a natural fit, tight Onshape integration, great manufacturing features, and it blended right into our commitment to the cloud.”

OnQ is saving up to 50% of the time to the engineering and purchase team to manage BOMs and Purchase Orders using OpenBOM. Read the full story here.

Vice President of Engineering, Gus Sharrock, explains, “OpenBOM manages all the items that eventually end up in our build,” he says, “the singular goal of our OpenBOM implementation was to produce a reliable, stable, and accurate Engineering Bill of Materials to such a level that we can hand it off to our operations team, and source components. We identified specific needs and goals, and OpenBOM was selected because of its unique ability to satisfy those requirements.”

Conclusion 

Focusing on efficient data management, replacing spreadsheets, and automating information flow from the first time Bill of Materials and related information is created can save tons of money in engineering time. OpenBOM allows you to generate BOMs, provide a single source of truth for everyone in the organization, and manage changes. By placing everyone on the same BOM and eliminating the need to copy/paste the data, you bring the organization to the next maturity level – these are major steps towards digital transformation in manufacturing. 

Check out what OpenBOM can do for you – REGISTER FOR FREE and start your 14-day trial today. 

Best, Oleg