Cost is one of the most important considerations in product engineering and manufacturing. On average, every dollar in cost is equal at least $3–5 dollars in sales. Unfortunately, the cost is often overlooked by designers, engineers and other people involved with product development.

Have a look at an earlier blog I wrote, Sharing “BOM anatomy” early in the process could have saved Juicero and maybe your hardware startup as well. Cost assessments and maintaining product information transparency is tough. It’s so easy to miss something. Ouch!

There are many things that influence cost. Let me just bring a few examples: excessive use of materials, late exposure to manufacturing planning, the need for manual assembly, significant shipment cost, and procurement impact. Sometimes, minor changes to an alternative part can lead to significant savings (share with procurement); expensive future maintenance, spare parts, production quantity assessment and so on, all impact costs.

Yet, here’s the thing, including all these things is hard and requires the involvement of the whole team including contractors, supplies and manufacturers. Sharing information about the BOM with all stakeholders and in addition, getting their feedback and corrections is not a simple task if the best tool you have is email and Excel files. This is where openBOM can be helpful indeed. With our soon to be available calculation and collaborative roll-up feature, you can do something rather unique: you can share a BOM with all the members of your team and collaboratively define elements therein.

openBoM keeps track and calculates product cost instantly each time someone from your team will go in the BOM and make a change. Every single change is recorded and tracked. You can always check who did what. Finally, you can create revisions (immutable snapshots) of specific BOM instances to track milestones along the way. Moreover, an intelligent change report tool will allow you to easily determine what was changed between any two revisions.

Watch the following video to get a glimpse of what I’m referring to which I hope you think, as I do, is rather unique and cool.

openBoM provides a unique collaborative BOM management tool that allows you to get everyone literally on the same BOM and what’s more, helps keep track of cost calculations. In a world where manufacturing is distributed, openBOM can help your team stay connected and on the same BOM.

Oleg, July 2017