OpenBOM Online Services – Solutions Overview

If you’re in the manufacturing business, then you know that staying competitive means having the right tools and processes in place. To be a competitively manufacturing business means getting efficient control over the data and processes in the organization. Modern manufacturing companies are facing many challenges by digitally transforming their businesses and it triggers many questions about what are the right tools. Are you looking for software that can manage your product data? Do you need help organizing and tracking your engineering and manufacturing processes? If so, OpenBOM may be the solution for you.

Yesterday, in my article, I shared an overview and recommendations about selections of OpenBOM Subscriptions. In this article, I’d like to give you a quick overview of OpenBOM platform capabilities as well as important services available at OpenBOM. We’ll take a look at some of the most important capabilities for engineers and manufacturers, and how OpenBOM can help you. We’ll also discuss some of the key benefits of using OpenBOM in your engineering and manufacturing business. So if you’re looking for a comprehensive PDM, PLM, and ERP solution, read on!

OpenBOM Online Services

Unlike many legacy software products, OpenBOM is a cloud-native online SaaS, which is available globally and provides online services using a multi-tenant data management platform. The solutions provided by OpenbOM can be grouped by multiple services and consumed via API as well as browser-based applications, specialized integrations, and desktop-connected tools.

In the picture below you can see an overview of OpenBOM solutions covering multiple disciplines of engineering and manufacturing software. To simplify the terminology and understanding of functions, I outlined them as follows: platform services, PLM services, ERP services, PDM services, and Data services.

Platform Services

The foundation of OpenBOM is its data management platform helping to organize information, manage data objects, share data and collaborate in real-time. OpenBOM’s instant data sharing capabilities allow multiple companies and individuals to get access to the data at the right time and provide role-based access to the information needed by engineers, contractors, suppliers, and customers. An open REST API allows you to provide access programmatically and integrates OpenBOM with other platforms and solutions.

PLM (BOM) Services

Bill of Materials is the foundation of product lifecycle management and therefore provides the most important data management software component in OpenBOM services. The core object model at OpenBOM provides data services to manage Items, Bill of Materials, Product Structure as well as perform a set of comprehensive operations such as BOM transformation, formula calculations, rollups, and others. The service also includes capabilities to manage history, revisions, and change processes, including approval workflows.

ERP Services

Manufacturing and procurement planning can be complex tasks, especially when it is taken in an isolated way. However, the connection of engineering and manufacturing processes can streamline data handover between engineers and manufacturing planners and eliminate many mistakes during the planning process. This is exactly what OpenBOM production planning and purchasing functions do – automatically connect to BOM data, perform management of vendors, RFQ, and PO functions.

PDM Services (Drive)

Files is a widely adopted paradigm that is used in many systems (desktop and cloud). Manufacturing companies are operating many desktops software packages in design, simulation, managing specifications, and other documents. OpenBOM Drive is a service that provides a way to manage files, support file collaboration in real-time, provide vaulting functions including check-in/out services as well as provide a 3D Viewer to get access to CAD files. 

Data Services

Data is the new oil and digital transformation raises the importance of innovation in data intelligence and analytics. OpenBOM platform uses multiple data management solutions including graph database (Neo4j), search (Elastic), and other databases and tools that help analyze the customer data and glean intelligence to fuel our decision management tools. Starting from intelligent search, we will be growing OpenBOM data services to help engineers solve complex data management problems.

Conclusion

OpenBOM is growing as a cloud-native SaaS platform providing a wide range of applications, functions, and services. At OpenBOM, we focus on solving painful problems of engineers, manufacturing companies, contractors, and suppliers. The biggest differentiation of OpenBOM is to provide services on multi-tenant data management platforms allowing you to perform multiple tasks and coordinate the work of multiple companies. 

Each group of OpenBOM services is growing based on the needs of our customers and solution scale. Size does matter in manufacturing. Therefore, large legacy PDM, PLM, and ERP platforms are not capable of providing solutions to small, nimble, and agile companies. This is a space where we launched OpenBOM cloud services. As we grow, the services will become more sophisticated and provide solutions for larger companies and bigger problems.

Check out some of OpenBOM customer stories to learn more on how OpenBOM helps individual engineers, small teams, medium-size manufacturing companies, and Fortune 500 enterprises.

REGISTER FOR FREE and learn more about how OpenBOM PDM, PLM, ERP solutions can help your businesses.

Best, Oleg