Using reliable design tools is key to a successful manufacturing process. The task of quickly moving critical product information from the designers to the planners to the buyers and on to the assemblers – without making any mistakes along the way – can often be difficult to achieve. A modern unified tool set which effectively hosts and communicates this information is the cornerstone of a successful process.

The January 2019 release of OpenBOM brings that end-to-end process to the Onshape community.

With OpenBOM, you can now:

  • Create visual BOMs (with thumbnail images) of your complete product structure.
  • Add additional non-modeled items like labor, glue, shipping and more using predefined properties or by creating your own custom property library.
  • Add costs including rolled-up costs, which is impossible to do in Excel.
  • Specify and calculate (rolled-up) quantities for all levels of your BOM. Again, this is impossible to do in Excel.
  • Specify vendors and verify inventory levels, and then generate purchase orders based on demand.
  • Maintain catalogs and inventory levels and collaborate with team members.
  • Integrate with every popular 3D CAD design tool, ideal for multi-CAD environments.
  • Automatically synchronize your BOMs with your design.

OpenBOM’s New Production Planning Dashboard includes all those activities necessary to turn your design BOM into a product: vendors, orders BOMs, production batches, purchase orders and more. Production planning is the business process which gets you out of design and into manufacturing.

Watch the video below to learn how you can take a real design from CAD to purchase order using Onshape and OpenBOM Production Planning:

 
 
 
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Here’s a look at the OpenBOM Production Planner dashboard with Order BOMs, purchase orders and vendor lists:

You can organize lists of vendors who you’re buying parts from:

Watch the video below to learn how OpenBOM defines and (re)uses your vendors in the production planning process:

 
 
 
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You can also create purchase orders automatically based on Order BOM, vendor assignments and Quantity Gap (demand minus quantity on hand). Yep, you can track inventory levels, too. OpenBOM creates a purchase order for each vendor in your Order BOM and automatically calculates the Quantity Gap. Here is an example of a PO generated from OpenBOM:

Just export as PDF (green arrow) and this PO is ready to go to McMaster Carr.

Finally, on the product side we have included some nice integration updates, several user enhancements, and the ability to brand your exports with your specific company logo.

OpenBOM Subscription Plans

OpenBOM has eliminated the subscription fee for our highest level Onshape integration. You now get all the custom BOM functionality we used to charge for -- for free -- with no strings attached. If you have been paying for Onshape premium integration, we will upgrade you to OpenBOM Professional User at no charge for the remainder of 2019. Our goal is to maximize your OpenBOM experience in every way possible.

We have also introduced a new OpenBOM subscription model, with other plan options:

For more information on OpenBOM subscription plans, please visit: www. openbom.com/pricing.

What’s Next for OpenBOM for Onshape?

OpenBOM has a bunch of new improvements in the pipeline to improve the overall experience of Onshape customers. They include:

  • Improved OpenBOM integration with Onshape’s multi-Document structure. We can see a more granular version-based structure of Documents in Onshape and we are going to eliminate some limitations. We will be making the first phase of these improvements in the next release.
  • OpenBOM will integrate with the Onshape release management process with a more automatic BOM generation process.
  • Improved OpenBOM catalog creation from Onshape data.
  • Quickbooks integration.

We all know that taking your design from an idea to a product is much harder than it looks from the outside. OpenBOM for Onshape and our new Production Planning dashboard is designed to make that journey easier. And now that OpenBOM’s most advanced Onshape integration is free, what are you waiting for?