A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Cloud and Next Generation of BOM

Cloud and Next Generation of BOM
Oleg
Oleg
19 October, 2011 | 2 min for reading

Few days ago, I was talking about some interesting patterns of PLM and ERP implementation. In a nutshell, the integration between PLM and ERP systems presents a significant level of implementation complexity. The need to synchronize between PLM and ERP storage is a complicated process that different among many companies. In many situations, service providers hired to make this implementation.

Earlier, this week, I stumble around Arena Solution website. The following white paper caught my attention – Beyond BOM 101: Next Generation Bill of Materials Management. Take your time and read this 8 pages document. It is worth reading. Despite the fact Arena is bluntly marketing their cloud BOM management tools in this paper, I found it explaining very well all challenges a company can face with regards to the management of Bill of Materials and related activities. According to Arena’s opinion, the following picture represents a very typical situation when BOM created by multiple people involved into the process of the project.

To answer the challenge, Arena presents another picture presenting next-generation bill of materials tool that bridges the design and manufacturing world. I tried to abstract the Arena name on this picture. The picture made me think about how the solution solves the problem.

I found that this architecture contains the same PLM-ERP implementation pattern that creates a high level of implementation complexity and requires a significant effort to be spent in order to be integrated between engineering Bill of Material in PLM and manufacturing BOM in ERP.

Now, let me get back to the Arena tools. Arena is suggesting “cloud BOM” solution. Does it mean the integration between BOM in Arena and manufacturing BOM in ERP will be different? Frankly, saying, I don’t know the real answer. Arena’s white paper didn’t say a word about how to integrate Arena BOM with ERP.

What is my conclusion? I think, cloud and other web-based solution can introduce many advantages. One of them is to streamline BOM access by members of the team. Think about BOM as a Google spreadsheet and you probably can get excited by how it may change the way you work. However, cloud technologies introduce new challenges (especially in the field of integration) that need to be solved. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud-based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups, and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
27 November, 2011

The announcement made by Dassault System last week, made me think about a huge distance CAD industry passed for the...

8 June, 2009

N-Trig presented a number of partners at SID 2009. I’m excited to see more and more examples of 3D applications...

24 January, 2020

PLM vendors are usually proud of the ability to scale up and support enterprise environments, complex product structures and sophisticated...

22 March, 2012

Let’s talk about Google today. I’ve been writing about Google technologies and Google enterprise efforts quite frequently. One of the...

24 January, 2017

IoT discussions are booming these days. The hype and expectations are so high. According to Gartner’s hype cycle, IoT is...

12 July, 2024

PLM and ERP are two topics that always can trigger an interest from industrial companies and software vendors. The ubiquitous...

2 July, 2010

I have been discussing Cloud-related topics on PLM Think Tank actively since last year. I think, the term is hugely...

13 January, 2024

In my earlier article How to bridge PLM and ERP Systems To Support Modern Product Development and Digital Thread I...

26 October, 2024

Last week, I attended Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego. I came to share OpenBOM experience of building digital workflows and integrating Fusion data...

Blogroll

To the top