They say timing is everything!
Puro Lighting founders Brian Stern, Webb Lawrence, and Jim Colantoni had excellent timing when they founded their workspace disinfecting company in 2019.
The Lakewood, Colorado company is a leading manufacturer of UV technology that makes workspaces safer and ensures a healthier workforce for their customers.
I recently sat down with Alex Wamain, the company’s New Products Mechanical Design Engineer, to learn more about why they chose OpenBOM and how Puro Lighting and their customers benefit from that decision.
“OpenBOM was the right choice for us at the right time, our company was scaling and we had to break our old unreliable spreadsheet habits”, says Alex.
Alex understood the problem of running Engineering and Manufacturing on spreadsheets.
“During my time at GE, I learned how important the engineering data is to the rest of the organization”, he says, “and how the success of the products relies on good communication with the consumers of the design data.”
“As Puro Lighting grew, our Excel system was becoming unwieldy and dependent on too many templates and tabs, we couldn’t make a reliable BOM and could not reuse it to introduce a new product.”
Alex became aware of OpenBOM in his work at GE and went to OpenBOM.com to learn more.
“We needed to move to a purpose-built tool capable of handling our needs, and OpenBOM was just the right thing.”
“We quickly signed up online”, he says, “and started a trial. Oleg, Steve, and the team were very helpful.”
Like many companies, Puro Lighting had some BOMs already in Excel to use as the foundation of their OpenBOM journey; they also understood how data flowed through their organization.
“We had a proto BOM in excel. We also had a data plan and understood our company’s purchasing categories.”
After browsing the OpenBOM online help, we realized that Items (Catalogs) were the important aspect of OpenBOM. The OpenBOM team showed us some best practices and we watched some videos”
“Teaching ourselves was very easy” ~ Alex Wamain
“Our BOM was Part Number and Quantity. In a very short time, we imported a 2 column BOM and connected it to our items Catalog. We had a complete, shareable, reliable, reusable BOM referencing a single item master catalog”
“Next, we attached reference files (Specs, PDF, etc) to the items, so each item has a part number, an image, specification PDF, vendor link, and everything purchasing needs to buy the part.”
“As we were ramping our products to manufacturing, we naturally had some changes, recreating these BOMs in Excel would have been very time-consuming. Knowing that our BOM references a single items list, we just make a change and the BOM or BOMs are automatically up-to-date.”
“Today, Puro Lighting has completely released products fully documented in OpenBOM.”
We asked Alex “How does OpenBOM help Puro Lighting help their customers?”
“With OpenBOM”, he says, “We can quickly create a new SKU for a customer. OpenBOM reduces cycle times by allowing us to easily reuse an existing BOM, make a few changes, and have an entirely new BOM SKU ready to go to manufacturing.”
“For example, we recently had a requirement for a new ballast enclosure based on an existing design, we easily reused the existing OpenBOM to create the new product.”
“The entire process to reuse a product BOM went from one hour to 5 minutes.”
Puro Lighting is a great example of the multi-CAD design environment supported by OpenBOM.
“We recently began moving our designs from Solidworks to Onshape and found the process to be very easy. We updated existing BOMs and OpenBOM worked flawlessly with Onshape.”
“Onboarding new engineers at Puro Lighting is much easier with OpenBOM. We simply add them to the team and they can learn all about our products – simply by browsing our OpenBOM product BOMs.”
“The people at OpenBOM are very open to the improvements we have suggested. Multiple vendors and pricing per item were very important to us and they recently added it to OpenBOM. It’s very nice.”
Everyone at OpenBOM appreciates your feedback Alex!
To learn more about Puro Lighting please visit purolighting.com
To learn more about OpenBOM please visit www.openbom.com
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