Bird control company, Bird Gard, purchased OpenBOM to answer the most important question any manufacturing company can have, how much does their product cost to build?
While their existing Microsoft Dynamics ERP had many features, it could not answer that simple question, especially with the complications and uncertainty of today’s global supply line.
The Bird Gard product is unique in many ways. It keeps any area free of birds by broadcasting real bird distress calls thus triggering a primal fear-and-flee response sending any birds in the area on their way!
The system is amazingly effective and technologically advanced utilizing a multi-discipline bill of materials, managed entirely in OpenBOM.
Bird Gard buyer, Heather Heath, explains, “Given the challenges and shortages in the component pipeline, we are buying far into 2022 and our Microsoft Dynamics Great Planes system just doesn’t offer the flexibility around cost management and forecast modeling that we need.”
“Great Planes just doesn’t work the way we work, happily, OpenBOM does.”
Bird Gard products are in use in over 25 countries on farms, landfills, and commercial sites, and every product contains a variety of proprietary circuit boards and other components, many with long lead times.
“We use a variety of PCB and other component suppliers”, Heather explains, “OpenBOM lets me keep track of each individual component, lead times, and variable pricing.
“As the prices of components are forever changing, we need to know how much it costs today AND what it will cost in the future”, Heather says.
Early on, Heather discovered OpenBOM’s flexible modern data model.
“I love how I can easily add a property, as many properties as I need, to manage costs and other information about Bird Gard items, our existing system just could not do that.”
“For example, OpenBOM can easily manage both an item’s Manufacturer Part Number and Supplier Part Number. I just add a column for each number and another for the URL link to the vendor’s product page, it’s that easy.”
While Heather brought OpenBOM in to solve a specific “buying problem”, OpenBOM is gaining adoption with Bird Gard as a whole.
“We are now sharing OpenBOM builds with our Contract Engineers”, she says, “something that was impossible with our installed ERP.”
“If we update a BOM, or a Revision, or the MFG Part Number [property], it’s automatically updated across all applications and the entire team stays in the know”, she says.
“I am no longer in the business of updating the Sharepoint files every time something changes <haha>”
“It was easy to buy and get started. I created our master part catalog, added the fields I wanted, then made the first product BOM in a matter of a few hours.”
Now, Bird Gard manages 5 individual products and their variations in OpenBOM.
According to Heather, “the main reason we bought OpenBOM was to improve the purchasing process. We didn’t understand our own costs and prices well and the analysis was time-consuming.”
“With OpenBOM”, she says, “We capture old/current/forecast cost columns which become the basis for our costing formulas.”
“We let OpenBOM do all the cost calculations. We know how much our product will cost today, and in 2022 and beyond, something we could not know accurately without OpenBOM”.
“OpenBOM will easily save me 40 hours a year just in cost analysis”, she says. “Oh, and we also get the right answer”.
“I always have a window of OpenBOM open on my desktop!”
To learn more about Bird Gard please visit birdgard.com
To learn more about OpenBOM please visit www.openbom.com
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