OpenBOM What’s New December 2022

Happy Holiday Season to everyone. The world is preparing to turn the calendar to 2023 and this is a great time to relax and take some time off with your families. I found this is also the greatest time to switch your minds from go-go everyday business and think about big topics you have no time to think about. Read more about it below. 

Here are the top three topics and features we introduced in this release: 

1. Introducing BOM compare service
2. OpenBOM and ManuFuture for bidding on custom mechanical parts 
3. CAD integrations improvements – Onshape, PTC Creo, Autodesk Fusion360

Let’s get into more detail… 

Digital Transformation On Your Mind, Drop Your Excels Now! 

In 2023, you should think about your company’s digital transformation strategy. Now, digital transformation is an important part of your business. Here is why… Imagine your life without the digital tools you use every day – search, navigation, shopping, media streaming, and communication. We take these tools for granted today and cannot live without them. 

Digital transformation in manufacturing will move companies to the next level of how they do business, communicate and work. Those that won’t adopt will stay behind. It will be like trying to find a person in a digital world using an old Yellow Pages book. You will stay irrelevant. 

I’m super excited to introduce you to the second OpenBOM release in December 2022, which we dedicated to bringing some very important features and functions to OpenBOM customers. 

Manufacturing Networks: OpenBOM + ManuFuture

We are super excited to bring our first partner to fulfill our vision of manufacturing networks. You can REGISTER to ManuFuture and use it now. More information is here. 

Earlier this month, we announced integrations between OpenBOM and ManuFuture platforms. If you missed our press release please check it here – OpenBOM and ManuFuture Announces Partnership to Streamline Product Development and Custom Parts Bidding Process. 

OpenBOM and ManuFuture partnerships extend both platforms’ complementary functions by providing an integrated and connected platform to support project data management, collaboration, and custom part bidding processes. OpenBOM and ManuFuture partnership gives you a simple way to manage the entire product development process. This includes product lifecycle management, project management, quality management, document collaboration, and custom parts bidding process. Both OpenBOM and ManuFuture are cloud-native platforms that give you access to all these features globally anywhere in the world.

Introducing BOM Compare Service 

How many times have you asked yourself the question – what changed? What changed from Rev2 to Rev5 of this BOM? What is the difference between the two assemblies? An intelligent BOM comparison service will help you to answer these questions. 

This release serves as the initial launch of BOM Compare! It is a data-driven utility to help you understand the changes and differences between revisions of a particular BOM or two completely different BOMs.

This new service gives you a convenient and reliable way to compare two BOMs, and revisions, and include multiple properties in the comparison criteria. By default presented with a Part Number comparison, it will give you multiple comparisons (eg. PN and Reference Designator) and in the future additional parameters.

Compare includes several advanced features like secondary property, showing only differences, and the ability to easily reverse the lists and compare in reverse.

Watch the following two videos to learn more about BOM compare services: 

• BOM Compare getting started
• Advanced compare using secondary comparison key (eg. Ref Des)

OpenBOM CAD Add-ins Improvements 

Our CAD integrations see some nice updates too. Support for PTC Creo Drawings, Onshape Automatic Drawing PDF gets a nice improvement to save you time. Autodesk Fusion360 improvements provided a nice workaround to some issues with Autodesk cloud services related to image preview generation. 

Onshape: Automatic PDF of Drawings now with one-click

This release brings a very nice improvement to the Onshape Automatic PDF of Drawings feature we released last month. You may now set a single setting and OpenBOM will automatically create a PDF for ALL drawings in your Onshape document. A very nice, simple, improvement that will save you time.

Keep in mind, that once you set this, it will be active every time you update your BOM.  

A quick video of the new feature

PTC Creo Drawings

This release completes the initial release of OpenBOM for PTC Creo Parametric with support for Creo Drawings in the addin. Full Drive features, Check-In/Out, Versions, Locate, etc, are available on the PTC Creo Drawing Drive menu.

Learn more about the OpenBOMf for Creo integration at www.openbom.com/openbom-integration-for-ptc-creo

Other user experience improvements and bug fixing

We are continuously improving OpenBOM user experience and fixing issues. If you think something can be improved in OpenBOM, please contact our support team by clicking a big Support button in OpenBOM lower right corner. Here are a few things we did earlier in December. 

Change History is now more informative

The History of command now tells you what it is a History of. Thanks to everyone who requested this easy improvement. Give it a try under Revisions->History.

Other User Experience Improvements and Annoying Bug Fixing

We fixed and improved some OpenBOM behaviors. Thanks to all our customers that reported issues – we appreciate you all very much. 

• Multiple collaboration icons – you will only see one icon per person in your BOMs or Catalogs
• The support button blocked some important messages. Fixed that.
• A better message when you are deleting a link that points to a file
• We’ve continued to improve the dashboard performance. When you add or delete items your counters should update in a timely fashion. 
• Drive folder check-in/out behaves better. Messages are sent quickly. Also fixed a condition when a user might not know they have a file checked out.
• Fixed a case when OpenBOM for Autodesk Fusion 360 was not finding the thumbnail image when your data is in the Autodesk Cloud. Sorry about that. We know it was a nuisance. It’s fixed.

Conclusion 

We’re saying Good Bye to 2022. It was a great year for OpenBOM. Wait for a more detailed final review of OpenBOM 2022, but so far I’m super excited about what we accomplished during the year and the way we’ve been growing OpenBOM. 

My best conclusion statement is coming from the last customer review on G2. Check this out. 

OpenBOM is great PLM / PDM for small business. OpenBOM fits our needs perfectly. As a small business with manufacturing, it allows us to define our product’s BOM / store and manage engineering data (using Drive add-on) / manage inventory / and quickly create orders for materials. I wasn’t able to find another small business PLM tool with all of these features.

Thank you all for helping OpenBOM as you know it. We appreciate your help and contribution in developing OpenBOM services.

Best, Oleg Shilovitsky, co-founder and CEO.