OpenBOM Digital Workflows

Our life is surrounded by data. It is especially important when it comes to various engineering, design, and manufacturing activities.  While engineers are working on designs, manufacturing engineers are working on production planning, a procurement department is focusing on ordering schedule and altogether is coordinating work of contractors and suppliers 

The speed of changes, competition, and increased risks of the supply chain presents ongoing challenges to manufacturing companies. At the same time, there are so many growth opportunities driven by the optimization of processes and cost, improved supply chain. But to find them is not simply if you’re using an old fashion working processes. 

About 35 percent of engineering time is wasted on tedious tasks like chasing down Excel files, manual cost tracking, creating PDFs, and connecting them together, purchasing activities, and many others. These processes are messy, complicated, and create many stops in the process of work. How to do so? We need to have a new way to organize a digital workflow. It includes a better way to generate and update information, share data, and optimize manual tasks. 

OpenBOM™ is an online SaaS application, which can help because it provides a unique way to extract the data from existing engineering systems, merge data from multiple data sources, organize calculations and share data with the right permission and right information with your team members, downstream to production and contractors. Having information connected regardless if the process goes inside the company as well as outside in a secure way is extremely important. 

In my article today, I want to bring 3 examples of digital data workflows supported by OpenBOM.

1- Continues Data Import 

OpenBOM gives you multiple options to bring data from external sources – Excel Files, Google Spreadsheets, multiple CAD, PDM/PLM, and ERP systems. The list of supported systems is here. The most important part that unlike many other systems that can import legacy data, OpenBOM is continuously importing data from different sources and simplify data entry, and helps you to eliminate manual data re-entry. 

2- Streamline Cost Management 

Each person should have access to the data he needs and being able to enter the data only once. It is a simple statement, but it is very hard to make. When it comes to Cost Management, nothing is more important than provide a way for multiple people in the team responsible for different pieces of information to combine it together. While the engineer is responsible for the design data, the “parts persona” is looking at where and how to buy these parts, the production planning team is working on contractors’ confirmation and deliveries. OpenBOM gives every single person to enter data simultaneously and at the same time instantly share all updates. Check OpenBOM real-time collaborative features for more information. 

3- Purchasing and Procurement 

Cost and Lead Time are the two most important in the manufacturing process. Manufacturing companies are continuously fighting cost competition and, therefore, to streamline the purchasing process is paramount. Easy to say, but hard to do. The purchasing process is dependent on many factors and one of them is team coordination and also data orchestration. To have the right information about what are long-lead items, to issue purchase orders for them, and continue to work on the design – this is the art of purchasing. Fighting multiple spreadsheets and systems – this is a reality for many procurement managers and purchasing teams. OpenBOM gives you a great set of tools hereby continuously integrating product bill of materials with and Orders and automatically generate and updates Purchase Orders for each vendor. Check more about it in our online documentation – Planning and Purchasing. 

Conclusion 

At OpenBOM, we are laser-focused on how to streamline data integration, optimize processes involved in product data and related information and help engineers, planners, procurement, contractors, and suppliers to work in a connected fashion together accessing the right data at the right time. Do you have a painful data workflow you want to optimize? Share it with us, we would be happy to help.

Check what OpenBOM can do for you by registering to OpenBOM. It has a FREE subscription tier and you can get a 14-days FREE TRIAL to test all OpenBOM professional, team, and company subscription levels. 

Best, Oleg @ openbom.com

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.