Rob Tucker is the owner and lead engineer at RD Tucker Design, a boutique engineering firm specializing in automated equipment design. You would know his work, from heavy-duty industrial equipment to elegant, high-speed coffee lid dispensers, and everything in between.
Rob’s work is technical and detailed.
Not unlike many engineers and designers, Rob uses CAD and OpenBOM, what is unusual is that RD Tucker Designs includes a Bill of Materials as part of the deliverable, their customer is expecting a fully (extremely) detailed BOM along with the design.
To that end, Rob is responsible for an engineering design (plan set) and the fully spec’d BOM, including vendor, vendor part number(s), cost, descriptions, and everything else his customer will need to turn Rob’s design into reality.
“OpenBOM allows me to give my customer every detail of the design”, says Rob.
Over the years, Rob has used several CAD tools for design, most recently relying on KeyCreator from Kubotek.
“The OpenBOM for KeyCreator integration is nice and saves me a lot of time compared to the old spreadsheet method”, explains Rob. “Prior to OpenBOM, every change I made to a design required a corresponding (manual) change to the spreadsheet”.
“Naturally every manual change was an opportunity for error, with OpenBOM, it is a single click to update the customer’s BOM”.
OpenBOM for KeyCreator automatically extracts the product structure and item information directly to the BOM.
Like many modern products, Rob’s customers find they need a mix of custom-designed manufactured items and COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) parts to complete their builds.
“OpenBOM lets me easily add a property Type to the BOM which identifies the item as COTS or Make” says Rob. “Then my client can easily plan their lead times and production run based on the item type”.
To learn more about OpenBOM please visit www.openbom.com
Learn more about Rob Tucker, RD Tucker Design, and automated machine design. Contact Rob via robtuck @ bellsouth dot net
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