New OpenBOM Onboarding Experience To Make Your Digital Transformation Seamless

Technologies are easy, but people are hard. People and education are a central place of digital transformation project failures. The adoption of software tools is a critical element in companies’ digital journey. In order to support OpenBOM’s growth last year, we came up with a very unique and custom-tailored onboarding program. 

Customer experience is always on the top of our minds at OpenBOM. After learning from many OpenBOM customers, we developed a methodology that helps us recognize typical use cases which in turn helps us move companies from their existing state of affairs to a fresher more organized system within OpenBOMS’s platform.

The aim of this service is to take you from Excel chaos into a Future Digital State. This service is a compilation of all the best practices we accumulated during the last few years working with thousands of engineers, manufacturing, and construction companies implementing OpenBOM. 

New Onboarding Training Course 

In today’s article, I want to give you a preview of what is coming next. For the last few months, we have been working on substantial enhancements of the OpenBOM onboarding experience course, which includes new information, guidance, examples, and templates to support new customers in the process of adopting OpenBOM services. The onboarding process includes 3 steps – Prepare, Build, Handoff. Let me take you through these phases in more detail. 

OpenBOM Onboarding Phases 

The onboarding process includes live consulting meetings that will help you to go in stages to capture basics about current company data management practices, existing processes, data sets, and requirements. 

Part of this process is the step to discover current gaps in data management, capturing engineering information, management of product data, change processes, and internal/external collaboration. 

This phase also includes a basic tutorial about OpenBOM data management principles and a walkthrough of the OpenBOM application. It concludes the “Preparation” step. The outcome of this phase is to create a sample set of materials based on the company data that can be used for the next session. 

The second phase “Build” includes a step-by-step hands-on session that builds on top of sample materials sets and the process flow diagram focusing on the fundamental elements of OpenBOM’s data model and business process flow. It includes creating a team, building catalogs and BOM, managing orders, and creation of purchase orders. Depending on the needs it might include a variety of integration training helping to get data via CAD add-ins, spreadsheets integrations, and REST API options to build custom integrations. 

Finally, the third phase “Handoff”, includes an interactive tutorial and working session to run an end-to-end process designed during the first stage. Also, the session focuses on setting up the process of existing company data import, future customization, and the next steps in consulting options to build a roadmap for future adoption of OpenBOM services. This session allows us to reflect on the goals of onboarding services and answer any open questions. 

Onboarding Experience 

As part of the onboarding process, OpenBOM provides interactive step-by-step instructions that can help you get familiarized with OpenBOM’s user interface and functionality. The guided tools become available to the customer to train their employees and other people that will be using OpenBOM. 

In addition to step-by-step guided tools, OpenBOM provides a quick tutorial online “cheat sheet” that can help users in their everyday experience and use of OpenBOM. 

Availability and Conclusion

OpenBOM onboarding service is currently available for OpenBOM customers purchasing Team and Company Annual Subscription. As part of the future enhancements in OpenBOM’s onboarding service, we plan to start offering OpenBOM onboarding to other subscribed members as a paid service. The information about it will soon be available in OpenBOM Training Library. 

In the meantime, REGISTER FOR FREE and check how OpenBOM can help you to improve your productivity and processes. 

Best, Oleg