Early preview: how to create an Order BOM with openBoM
The ultimate goal of every manufacturing company is to make a product and ship it to its customers. Everything else is secondary. After speaking to many engineers, hardware startups, job shops and small manufacturing companies, we are certain ordering of parts is an imperative for everyone. Unless you’re outsourcing your manufacturing completely to a contract manufacturing company, you will have to deal with parts ordering. What’s more, if you combine contract manufacturing with in house assembly you will have to deal with both engineering and standard parts in different variations.
I’m very excited because we are close to taking a step towards helping engineers and manufacturing teams to ordering parts and do initial production planning. Initial production planning involves creating a planning BOM (order BOM) to manage the right quantities and collaborate ordering process internally in the company and externally with contractors and suppliers.
A little bit of background about this process. There are two input data sources required to create an order BOM: engineering (or design BOM) and Part catalogs (inventories). The engineering (design) BOM has all the parts you design and engineer in the product. In openBoM this BOM usually comes from a variety of CAD integrations we support (learn more, here), any number of Excel sources imported to openBoM, and manual data input. A part catalogs (or inventories) in openBoM is a list of all the parts you might have at your company, both engineering parts and standard parts. openBoM gives you a means to create an unlimited number of Part catalogs with custom parameters. Think about Electrical, Mechanical, Standard and other catalogs. You can classify them by locations, etc.
The Order BOM definition contains both the number of product units and list of parts to be ordered, as well as required quantities of parts and quantities gaps. The number of units is defined when you create a production batch for a released BOM in openBoM. Quantity gaps are calculated based on part quantity as it defined in the inventory.
The simplified process diagram looks like this:
The following video gives you an idea of what will be available soon in openBoM for production (Beta) version.
Conclusion. Order BOM is step into the realm of manufacturing for openBoM. One of our long term visions is to close the loop between engineering and manufacturing. Order BOM is first practical step in this direction. We are interested in your feedback to clarify and tune the process and implementation of Order BOM. So, if you feel order that the Order BOM functionality is something you might be using in your company (or team), please reach out to me. We would love to have a talk, demo and discuss how we can help you start using it tomorrow.
Best, Oleg @ openbom.com
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.
