Controlling contractors’ work using openBoM real-time collaboration

In modern manufacturing all production is rarely done in the same building. Today, many manufacturing companies are distributed with people located across countries and geographies.

What’s more, manufacturing companies work intensively with contractors to distribute project work based on specialty, skills and capacity.

In such distributed situations, a team can be confronted with big hassles. Companies are looking for ways to improve the process of distributed manufacturing more efficiently. A traditional method used by many engineering software, PLM providers, and collaboration portals in these situations is relatively simple: data is extracted from a PLM (or another data management systems) environment and placed in a separate space. Often, data comes from zip files, archives, and spreadsheets. Why? Because those data sources are easy and ubiquitous. Contractors are not usually limited to the tools they use. Also, contractors don’t have access to core company PLM tools for various yet valid reasons.

Working thus is a big problem. Problems include, (1) it’s hard to track data and changes made by suppliers; (2) data updates and collaboration are not easy to achieve; and (3) control and collaboration is limited. There are more reasons, but those three I mentioned are universal.

The recent release of our SOLIDWORKS PDM plug-in for openBOM (more info, here) caused us think more about future use cases for openBoM. By that I mean how openBoM can extend any data management environment by introducing a new technology for collaboration with contractors. It can solve the aforementioned problems in more efficient and effective ways.

Data synchronization between data management systems and openBoM is seamless (thanks to openBoM’s change management technologies). Real-time data collaboration gives you control in real time of what happens to data accessed by multiple users. openBoM provides a tool to control what is done by your contractor and help coordinate and supervise these processes in real time. The following two video gives you an idea of what I mean.

Conclusion. We are looking for companies to experiment with new ways to collaborate and coordinate work with suppliers and contractors. The flexibility and cloud data management technology of openBoM opens new ways to control product development process by connecting silos of information and providing transparent access to status and data. Drop me a line if you’d like to learn more and possibly try openBoM in your company.

Best, Oleg

PS. We should know each other better. If you live in a Greater Boston, please let’s have a meeting (coffee is on me). If you’re located in other places, let’s have a virtual coffee session — I will figure out how to send you a real coffee for our virtual coffee session.