How to Use OpenBOM Item Links in External Applications

Modern manufacturing is increasingly relying on a variety of online tools and applications to manage different aspects of their operations—be it engineering, manufacturing, project management, or sales. 

The old-school approach of maintaining a single, centralized database for everything is becoming less effective. Instead, companies are building digital ecosystems with seamless connection of cloud services and applications, enabling companies to integrate specialized tools that cater to their unique needs. The real power comes from ensuring that data flows easily across these tools. 

At OpenBOM, we believe in creating an open foundation for connecting product information across platforms, enabling efficient collaboration between teams and systems. The shift from the monolithic “single database” model to an interconnected, cloud-native digital ecosystem opens up endless possibilities.

OpenBOM: A Cloud-Native Platform for Connecting Your Product Information

As a cloud-native platform, OpenBOM provides the robust foundation for integrating your product information with other online services and applications, ensuring that teams can access the data they need when they need it. With OpenBOM, you can connect your product data—such as Bills of Materials (BOMs) and individual items—to external platforms like project management (e.g., Monday.com) and task management (e.g., JIRA). This approach not only streamlines workflows but also ensures data accuracy and real-time collaboration.

In this new world of interconnected services, OpenBOM allows you to expand beyond traditional boundaries and link to external systems where teams collaborate on projects, tasks, or product updates.

How to Connect Data from OpenBOM to External Applications

The key to connecting data from OpenBOM to external applications lies in the use of OpenBOM direct links—specifically, the Item URL and BOM URL. These URLs serve as unique identifiers for items or BOMs in OpenBOM, allowing them to be easily referenced in other applications.

For instance, when creating a new task or issue in tools like JIRA or Monday.com, you can embed an OpenBOM Item URL or BOM URL directly into a custom field, providing team members with immediate access to the relevant product information. This simplifies the process of sharing up-to-date data across platforms, ensuring that everyone is aligned.

Here’s how you can use OpenBOM links in different scenarios:

• Example 1: JIRA Task Creation
  When creating a task in JIRA, simply paste the OpenBOM Item URL (e.g., of a component) into a custom field. This way, your engineering team can reference the specific item directly from the JIRA ticket, without having to switch between applications.
• Example 2: Monday.com Project Management
  In Monday.com, you can include the item (or BOM) URL in a project update or task assignment. By embedding this URL, your team can view the entire Bill of Materials, helping project managers track progress and material status without leaving the project management tool.

These connections allow for real-time collaboration and data sharing across different departments and tools, ensuring that all stakeholders have the necessary product information at their fingertips.

What’s Coming Next?

The future of OpenBOM’s connectivity capabilities is even more exciting. We are actively working on data modeling enhancements that will introduce custom objects and object references (links). This will further improve the robustness of your product data management, enabling you to build an even more complex and flexible data model.

With these upcoming features, OpenBOM will support more advanced object relationships, allowing you to create and link custom data objects, effectively transforming how product information is organized and shared across applications.

Conclusion: The OpenBOM Vision

At OpenBOM, our vision is to provide a flexible and robust data model that can be easily integrated with other cloud services, allowing product information to flow seamlessly between different departments. By offering direct links to items and BOMs, OpenBOM enables users to collaborate across engineering, production, sales, and other functions—building a digital network that connects people and data in a meaningful way.

Stay tuned as we continue to enhance our platform and make it even easier to connect your product data to the tools you rely on every day.

REGISTER FOR FREE and check how OpenBOM can help you. Best,
Oleg