Norweigian robotics firm Currence Robotics has a strategic reliance on cloud technologies and that demand-led them straight to OpenBOM for cloud-based Saas PLM. “We love how OpenBOM fits into our Engineering SaaS stack at Currence Robotics” says Currence Robotics Mechanical Engineer Eivind Egeland. “It simply meets the demands of our all cloud philosophy”.
Founded just a few short years ago in 2016, Currence quickly became a leader in the automation of grocery warehouse logistics with a pallet sorting machine currently in production and a “picker” due to be released this month. In doing so, they developed an engineering and business process that relies heavily on cloud computing.
“There are many shapes and sizes of grocery products”, he says, “it is hard to compete with the versatility of the human hand,” says Eivind. The Currence Robotics design team relies on OpenBOM to help work through the evolution of their designs.
Taking a closer look, the Currence product includes a wide variety of engineering disciplines; physics, kinematics, vision, mechanical and electrical engineering, cost optimization, and so much more are constantly under evaluation as their products evolve.
OpenBOM brings together multiple BOMs from a variety of disciplines to help Currence Robotics evaluate all this from the top down. “Accessibility and scalability,” says Eivind, are key. “We have many people involved in a variety of critical business activities and all must have access to the live Bill of Materials without reliance on email, or Excel.”
“We were constantly updating and emailing Excels with changes as we transitioned from proto builds to production planning”. Prior to OpenBOM, keeping track of changes and builds was difficult at Currence.
“Initially we settled on OpenBOM as a logical extension to our 3D design platform, Onshape. We saw the opportunity to leverage all metadata in Onshape but needed an organized way to bring it to the company (many of which were not engineers) for production. With OpenBOM we get the very reliable Onshape integration AND the ability to add and extend the data set as it flows through our company”
Beyond the metadata integration, OpenBOMs support of Onshape Categories and the ability to extend the data set with OpenBOM Item Master Catalogs Currence Robotics can bring data from Onshape, automatically organize it in OpenBOM based on the Onshape Category, then add additional properties like Cost or Labor which then flow to the rest of the Company through the OpenBOM collaboration features.
“Eventually we organized all our standard parts into catalogs using Onshape Categories which (automatically) created a nice reusable library of parts in OpenBOM Catalogs.”
“The OpenBOM Catalog is the best way to keep track of metadata from Onshape. We keep design info in CAD and the business data in OpenBOM. That way our Onshape design is relatively constant and unchanging as the design matures, then as we go to manufacturing OpenBOM gets the changing/business data like Cost, lead time, vendor, etc., all without disrupting the CAD and engineering teams”
According to Eivind, Currence Robotics likes OpenBOM as a solution because it is “Accessible, not very expensive, easy to implement and deploy to our staff and comes without the overhead of Big PLM.”
Plus, “visual BOMs (with thumbnail images) and Multi-level BOMs are easy to present and understand. Onshape and OpenBOM together just feels like a complete solution, he says.
While Currence Robotics will be shipping their new product shortly, they are already looking ahead and planning the release of their picking robot and counting on the scalability of OpenBOM to help them get there.
To learn more about Currence Robotics please visit https://www.currence-robotics.com/
To learn more about OpenBOM please visit www.openbom.com
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