In Stay Sharp Episode 118, Digital Product Series: OpenBOM, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant sit down with returning guest Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO of OpenBOM, a collaborative workspace platform for PDM, PLM, inventory, and procurement. After Oleg’s previous visit to discuss what drives business value in PLM (Stay Sharp Episode 111), he’s here this time to talk about the company he co-founded.
OpenBOM’s Value Proposition
Oleg explains that the company started with a vision. “The reason we started OpenBOM,” he says, “is because we believe that the way data is organized and flowing between organizations is broken.” The primary reason that’s so, he believes, is that we used to think about data flowing within a single company, but in today’s marketplace and world, no company is an island. Everyone is connected and interconnected, and people aren’t building products as much as they’re providing services or experiences that involve products. The core idea of OpenBOM is that the platform should be able to work with multiple companies and to share data between different companies in real time.
The point of OpenBOM was to create a platform that makes connections—and connections are the key. Uber, Facebook, Airbnb provide different services, Oleg notes, but they’re all about connections. “The connections came always as a major element of how business is becoming successful,” he says. Unfortunately for manufacturers, for many years PLM was more about hoarding data. Instead of that approach, OpenBOM was built as a platform to bring connections into PLM. One way the software does that is making information easily available to everyone else in the organization, from engineering to procurement and beyond. “Simple PLM problem,” Oleg says, “Make data available. Make data open. That’s the immediate value that OpenBOM gives you.”
OpenBOM’s Customers
The company recognized early that they can’t outspend the big PLM companies, and they took a different approach to reach companies that might be in need of PLM: providing content and out-teaching other providers. Oleg explains they target problems people want to solve and educate to those—which may explain why Oleg is responsible for authoring more than 6,000 blog posts on PLM. Then OpenBOM offers immediate hands-on experience. Oleg says, “OpenBOM is the only PLM system that you can go now on the website, create an account, and start using it in 30 seconds. And you’ll be using a full production OpenBOM account that will be limited to 14 days trial.”
Oleg describes their customers as not belonging to any particular industry, but as characterized by three factors. They are companies delivering a complex product—typically combining mechanical, electrical, and software elements. They’re small organizations that don’t have unlimited funds or extensive IT support. And they want speed. “The company has the desire to be modern, agile, and move fast,” Oleg says.
The Functionality in the Collaborative Workspace
Rather than talking about how many features OpenBOM has, Oleg continues to speak about solving problems. OpenBOM provides three fundamentals: the ability to organize data that customers are working with, connecting that data to everything—whether CAD systems, financial systems, software management systems, etc.—and intelligent decision-making tools. Jonathan points out that what’s especially valuable is the software’s ability to “share information in a secure way that everybody can be comfortable with. We can understand what is and is not shared in a way that still gets you the intelligence piece … but within the confines of everybody having their data secured.”
The future for OpenBOM is what Oleg calls product memory, and it’s all about being able to feed AI good data that is related to what your organization does. In his view, “OpenBOM creates a product memory about everything that you did in your product, the way you designed, the way you manufacture, the way it was in all revisions, everything. And then this product memory is becoming a context for AI algorithms to help you to rationalize, to bring intelligence.” And as much as this technology is aimed at making AI the best tool it can be for your organization, Jonathan points out that the underlying technology will also feed the collaboration and business intelligence tools that OpenBOM is based on. OpenBOM is unique, Jonathan concludes. “If people aren’t catching it, this is a little different than what they might think of as typical PLM.”
Learn More About How OpenBOM Can Help You
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Oleg’s wifi-enabled toaster means product complexity might have gone too far, why customers don’t want to or need to know about OpenBOM’s underlying technology, why OpenBOM hasn’t bothered reinventing a user experience that culturally everyone already knows how to use, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 118: Digital Product Series: OpenBOM and join us each week for a new podcast.
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