Beyond PLM: 10 years of blogging and starting a video blog – Musings about Bill of Materials

I have a small anniversary today. I started my blogging back in 2008. It happened back at Autodesk University 2008. The idea of blogging came to me as I was looking how to share knowledge and ideas about Product Lifecycle Management. I can say that I have learned a lot and I met so many interesting people during all these years. I found blogging as one of the best ways to practice my brain muscle. It is a challenge to come every day (or almost every day to be fair) with a blog topic. And I love this challenge.

Time is running fast and Beyond PLM is 10 years old. This week I’m attending AU 2018. For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about what can be the next thing for me to do at Beyond PLM. Here is a story to share with you.

PLM is going through the identify crisis. I wrote about it before – Can we still sell PLM acronym? It was one of the topics I discussed at PI PLMx event in Chicago last week – Killing PLM…  Should we replace it by one of the new “modern” trends – Product Innovation Platform, Digital Transformation and others? This is a great question, but I don’t know the answer. So, I want to talk about it…

I can see an opportunity to get back to “basics”. And one of the most fundamental things in manufacturing and product development is Bill of Materials (BOM). I call it a lifeblood of manufacturing. Everyone needs a BOM – without BOMs you cannot design, manufacture, sell and support products. Even Bill of Materials can sound as a simple thing, they are actually not.

I decided to start a video blog to discuss Bill of Materials on Beyond PLM. It will be called – Musings about Bill of Materials.  It is not very well defined yet. If you’re familiar with agile development methods, I will start from MVP first and then adjust it as I move forward.  As an idea (minimum viable blog), I want to record videos to share my knowledge about Bill of Materials and to bring other people to share and discuss their knowledge and experience related to Bill of Materials, best practices, tools, implementations and more.

Here is my first video. Don’t judge it too much – this is my first one. I will learn as I go, so give me some Youtube love 🙂 (I mean likes and shares :)). Web site will be coming soon on bomusings.com.

What is my conclusion? There is a huge demand for simplification. I can hear many people are looking how to get away from complexity of terminology, strange acronyms and names that actually not helping to understand how to manage product development and manufacturing. Bill of Materials is a good starting point. Most of people are in agreement about Bill of Materials (terminology) and I look forward to discover more as I will make a progress with my new video blog. As always, I look forward to your comments, ideas and also participation. Please bring ideas and tell me if you’re interested to participate.

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