Bridge Appliances has selected OpenBOM and Deskera to improve efficiency and deliver revolutionary food preparation automation to the hospitality industry.
Engineers at the Portsmouth, NH, company have mastered the most difficult of tasks, to reliably, repeatedly automate the cooking of the perfect egg – every time!
Formed in 2020 the company recently selected OpenBOM for product definition & BOM management and Deskera to manage their manufacturing change process and ECOs.
Bridge Appliances COO, Connor White, is responsible for putting operation systems into place, developing customer relationships, and positioning the business for growth.
“We are dedicated to Agile product development and the advantage SaaS brings to the company,” he says, “we selected OpenBOM for product definition & BOM management and Deskera ERP for their excellent integration and complement to our business strategy.”
The company’s product refrigerated eggs until cracked and cooked in a hot skillet, delivering the perfect cooked egg, every time!
Bridge Appliances targets several segments of the food and restaurant industry; from high-end coffee shops, and hotel & university dining outlets seeking to improve throughput at the point-of-sale, to bodega-style restaurants, hotels, and hospitality outlets seeking to deliver a great-looking luxury product while reducing waste and loss.
In OpenBOM, teams can manage product variants to help Bridge Appliances target new vertical markets.
“In the future, our devices will be equipped for self-service in hotels and dining halls while the initial design targeted restaurants + cafes that have trained users in the back of the house.”
Like many Agile companies, Bridge Appliances puts a premium on cycle times.
“We’ve developed a culture of rapid R&D by equipping ourselves with tools & machinery in-house. This has allowed us to design and build rapidly instead of being tied down by lead times, which was a savior during the supply chain snags from the COVID-19 pandemic. In just a year and a half, we’ve positioned ourselves to bring our product to market with a small team of 6 people,” explains Connor.
“We see OpenBOM as the means to quickly organize our data. The Solidworks integration enables us to quickly pivot from R&D to production without getting bogged down chasing files, component specs, and drawings to provide to suppliers. Everything is in one place for everyone in our business! Which is great for people on our team like me who we can’t justify a PDM license for.”
“OpenBOM has helped us position the company to make the leap from R&D to production. We now have a single source of truth to keep track of supplier quotes, lead times, and other pieces of data that help us stay informed on our product costs and when we can deliver to our customers, which was a pain point while we were in development without OpenBOM. Before we had to ask for files from our engineering team, taking valuable development time away from them to dig up a drawing or supplier quote.”
“As a result, we connected the engineering process to the company and began to have visibility into our sourcing demands and efforts, both short and long term.”
Keep in mind that Bridge Appliances is an entire product from concept to fruition. The prototypes and engineering/test beds are built in-house. The team masters their entire product in OpenBOM, leveraging a great deal of the product structure and definition from the OpenBOM for Solidworks and the Electronics Library integration.
“We found early on that OpenBOM can manage our in-house Alpha builds and help us keep track of local inventory, The Solidworks integration significantly reduces the tedious tasks of calculating demand (e.g. counting screws) and ordering for the early builds.”
“The CAD designers easily send all the necessary CAD and neutral files to OpenBOM which are then exported to the suppliers, easily and reliably. As a result, we know the CAD files always match the revision of the build.”
“And, I LOVE the Octopart integration, it is a huge help!”
“We organize our cables and circuit boards with OpenBOM, find and track manufacturers’ part numbers and specs, and track pre-manufacturing or longer lead time items all while the BOM is in flight!”
“All of which makes it easier for us to track changes and communicate with suppliers.”
“We have significantly reduced the time to maintain and order inventory, manage our sub-assembly requirements, source components, and deliver builds.”
“BOM and product definition tasks that used to take weeks are now completed in a matter of days, largely because of the excellent Solidworks & Octopart integration.”
“The Octopart integration alone saves hours of engineering time a week!”
“As we ramp to volume manufacturing, we will continue to look to OpenBOM PLM and Deskera ERP to manage the product and communicate changes.”
To learn more about Bridge Appliances, please visit https://www.bridgeappliances.com/To learn more about OpenBOM, please visit www.openbom.com
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