G2

John C.

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/16/2024

"A better BOM"

4/5

What do you like best about OpenBOM?

Open BOM has been a great tool allowing me to accurately calculate costing and then saves me hours of work for every subsequent update. I would say that OBs biggest competitor is excel or google sheets. I went through the excercise of creating boms in both to see if OB provided enough value to justify the cost. The main thing for me is the fact that it maintains links between cad and costing data. For excel or sheets that link is broken so any changes require manual management of all data. Thats so time consuming and leads to more errors.

Being able to calculate part costs and have them roll up to the top of the bom means that I can create orders using whatever combination of products and know that my costs are accurate for each item. I created material catalogs in open bom for all raw materials (tube, angle, sheet metal etc) so I can adjust my material prices and have that change propegate to all parts and assemblies that use that material.

Ordering parts becomes a lot more straight forward. Instead of manually building order sheets in a spread sheet I can simply select the products or parts I want to add to an order at the desired quantity and create my PO. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about OpenBOM?

There is a learning curve to OB that was a bit steeper than I expected. Because this is not a typical spread sheet it doesent necessarily work the way you would expect. Formulas can be somewhat limited as they cant only handle one set of parenthases but that is something I believe they are working to develop so this might not be a relevant complaint in the future.

I would say that their documentation is pretty good to get started but not all scenarios will be covered and so I needed technical support at times to figure things out.

This might be an issue with solidworks but when I update parts the thumbnails are often not updated correctly even though I have "recalculate thumbnail" selected in the settings. This is especially problematic when a part has changed size but is showing the old part. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is OpenBOM solving and how is that benefiting you?

Open bom maintains links between cad files and boms. This makes costing calcuations throughout the product development cycle much faster and more accurate. Previously I would have to export boms from the solidworks drawings and then create an excel spreadsheet bom. This required a lot of manal entry and formatting. If changes were made I would basically be starting over. Open bom keeps the link between the bom and the cad files so updates and their associated cost changes are reflected in a few clicks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Oleg Shilovitsky of OpenBOM

edit

Hi John, thank you very much for sharing your feedback and review. We really appreciate it. OpenBOM is a different from a typical spreadsheet, because it only looks like a spreadsheet. It is a database with structured set of relationships running behind the scene and we manage structured product data. However, I'd like us to dig deeper to understand your problem with the image you mentioned. It can be browser cache, but want to check it. Do you mind to contact our support? Thank you, Oleg

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