Subasmbly - A bill of materials application
Bill of Materials is an application for small, manufacturing-based businesses that aims to fill the space between using Excel spreadsheets for parts management and making a capital investment in an enterprise level database management system. By creating a centralized hub for BoM management, Bill of Materials provides parts management and revision control as well as communication tools to manage suppliers and customers and ensure that all parties are working from the latest and greatest information. Revision control saves project cost and hours by minimizing the risk of purchasing or manufacturing incorrect or out of date parts and Bill of Materials
Goals for this project center around creating a solid, useful, extensible, and scalable application that can be grown and monetized. Plans for later versions include implementation of an API that will allow BoMs to be populated with purchasing data from participating vendors as well as an API implementation that will interface with various CAD platforms and increase productivity.
I have worked as a designer and engineer in various manufacturing environments for all of my almost 20 year career, and at every job and every position, communication of accurate up-to-date data is the most critical task. Unfortunately, there are very few revision control systems that exist between the inaccurate and time consuming world of Excel-based Bill of Materials management and the accurate, time consuming, and prohibitively expensive world of enterprise level database management systems. Many of my working environments have been in smaller and family run businesses who can greatly benefit from simple revision control and parts management, a market segment that is currently under-represented in the marketplace.