OpenBOM is a digital network-based platform that manages Product data and connects manufacturers and their supply networks from the company of the same name in Boston. OpenBOM enables users to share and collaborate data using online Bill of Materials from initial design through all stages of engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain.
$25
per month
PTC Windchill
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
PTC offers Windchill, the company's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that includes BOM (a digital bill of materials) for cost and product quality control via parts-centric source of truth, dynamic and updated product change and configuration management to ensure up-to-date product information, industry standards and requirements validation and control, and role-based data access among other features.
OpenBOM is well suited for users who require the ability to have a "structured sandbox" when it comes to part, BOM, and vendor management. By having this structure, it allows for consistent capturing of key information, in a structured way, while also being dynamic where approved users can modify the information without too much overhead. We're using it for a medical device.
It provides in-depth product information such as Technical Data, CAD model, 2D drawing, ECR document, ECN document. Integration between windchill and creo is seamless. In addition to it, it provides necessary tools for data transfer, distribution, reviewing, and publishing of product data. Moreover, one can manage the complete product life cycle just on the web.
Windchill is an extremely verbose and unintuitive system, with masses of unnecessary duplication of fields, convoluted workflows, unclear roles and terrible search capabilities. It is one of the worst software products I have ever seen to propose solving something that is actually factors quicker to do with manual writing and paper work
OpenBOM is mainly BOM-centric, whilst PLM solutions have much wider functionality, suitable for cross-department activities. We are in constant search and evaluation of a one-fits-all solution and, I must say, after a price spike, OpenBOM doesn't look as attractive as it used to.
It can be compared directly to any CMS at the base level. SharePoint/Drupal are in this category and support document versioning, search, collections. Furthermore, certainly in SharePoint you can build flows and manage system logic through power automate, SharePoint lists and power apps. Furthermore, it is possible to assign a multitude of roles/groups to SharePoint. SharePoint can present documents in-frame, it can search and so on. Where Windchill proposes to improve upon the CMS is in providing the roles and flows, in this case, specific to a QMS. Unfortunately it does not include the grass roots level build of something like SimplerQMS which incorporates even the generation of the required documents in phase through templates and suggestions. Windchill proposes to address the niche problem of an eQMS, without really providing anything that is implied by the "e" for electronic, meaning faster and more efficient. No, everything in Windchill is manual, intensive and convoluted. I don't have a good word to say about it.
My company has avoided (literally) hundreds of misconfigurations, saving us months of development cycle time.
We have been able to streamline vendor management/ approval (or disqualification), reducing the overall time from ~8 hours to <2 hours per vendor. And our maintenance of the vendors (e.g. requalification) has similar savings.
Saves time as all of our drawings and business instructions and procedures are housed in a central location with check-in/out capability and version control.
