Community Spotlight: OpenBOM shares what it's like to speak at Forge DevCon

OpenBOM and Forge DevCon: Showing Customers how we are developing BOM value chain applications with the Forge Viewer and Data Management APIs

by Oleg Shilovitsky

Forge DevCon is a fantastic opportunity to connect with Autodesk developers and learn from communication with customers. This year will be the 3rd year for Forge DevCon. It will be held in Las Vegas on the Monday before AU2018 (November 12th, 2018). The call for proposal website is now live and will be open until June 11th. Don’t wait until the last moment to submit your proposal!

Meantime, I wanted to share OpenBOM’s experience with Forge DevCon. We attended all of them - 2016 (in San Francisco), 2017 (in Las Vegas). At Forge DevCon 2017, OpenBOM’s case study session shared our real-world scenario of integration between 2 cloud systems - Fusion360 and OpenBOM. It included demos and open live discussion.

The class we taught featured OpenBOM integration. To connect data from Fusion360 to OpenBOM, we used the DM API (Data Derivative API) to transform Fusion360 design into a modern powerful Bill of Materials management system available online for everyone. We demonstrated how the Autodesk Forge platform and Fusion360 provides a great opportunity to address customers’ needs by taking full advantage of a modern cloud infrastructure to remove collaboration and communication barriers.

Manufacturing companies are facing difficulties finding a simple yet efficient bill of materials management system integrated with their CAD and engineering environment. The Forge Platform is a great place to provide the infrastructure for CAD, 3D and 2D collaboration.

The days of designing and manufacturing 100% of a product in a single place are over. Manufacturing companies are now involved in complex value chain relationships from concept to completion, from engineering to customer support. The ability to work at a distance and collaborate is one of the most crucial elements of any company today. Bill of Materials plays a key role in organizing product development, manufacturing, and supply chain processes.

And… here is a problem - BOM spreadsheets are by far the most common tool of choice for managing part lists. Which is very inefficient. Manufacturers are undergoing a tremendous transformation as they learn and to cope with the convergence of a global internet of connectivity, distributed locations, and supply chain. The spreadsheet just doesn’t work well in such an ecosystem.

OpenBOM solves the nightmare of managing BOMs by spreadsheet. The Forge Viewer and Data Management API have allowed OpenBOM to easily integrate the valuable manufacturing information from Fusion360 3D CAD into the value chain downstream processes. At OpenBOM, we’ve been using AMC Bridge to provide integration with OpenBOM core. It helps us in many ways - their core development experience, strong knowledge the CAD industry, multi-CAD and mixed CAD environments, agile and importantly rapid product development. AMC Bridge has become a valuable partner in our business.

Conclusion

The collaboration between Autodesk, OpenBOM and AMC Bridge enables us to build a highly differentiated product. Shared knowledge and collaboration is the key in this successful partnership. I’m looking forward to Forge DevCon 2018 in November and hope to see you in Las Vegas.

If you have a class idea or a project to share, submit your idea today.

About AMC Bridge and OpenBOM:

AMC Bridge is a vendor of choice for software development services in the areas of computer-aided design, engineering, manufacturing, and construction. Since 1999, we have been delivering solutions for CAD, CAE, CAM, PDM, BIM and PLM applications. We have participated in the development of commercial software products and custom solutions for the engineering markets based on a variety of platforms, from desktop and web to mobile and cloud.

About OpenBOM™ is online service helping engineering teams and manufacturing companies to manage Bill of Materials, Part Catalogs and Inventories. It enables people to collaborate on the Bill of Materials from initial design through all stages of engineering, manufacturing and supply chain. OpenBOM connects multiple data silos together and replaces Excel spreadsheets with a global integrated data management solution. OpenBOM is integrated with many CAD systems. OpenBOM is Autodesk Forge partner using Forge Platform to facilitate data exchange, 3D CAD data management, and collaboration. Best, Oleg @ openbom