Case Study: a Fortune 500 global consumer electronic manufacturer improves agile product development and BOM collaboration with OpenBOM

Consumer Electronic (Fortune 500) Company Turns To OpenBOM to Support Agile New Product Development, Improve Collaboration and Purchasing Process

A Fortune 500 global consumer electronics manufacturer faced significant hurdles in its new product development process. Its existing legacy PLM system was too complex and costly for collaboration, forcing teams to rely on a fragile network of error-prone Excel spreadsheets to manage crucial product data. This inefficient process, which lacked access control and a single source of truth, was a major bottleneck as the company prepared to scale into high-volume manufacturing and needed to improve collaboration. The company turned to the vendor OpenBOM for a solution.

OpenBOM provided a flexible, cloud-based platform that replaced the disconnected Excel files with a centralized system for Bill of Materials (BOM) management. The solution offered a familiar spreadsheet-like interface but with powerful data management, collaboration, and revision control features. OpenBOM enabled seamless data import from Excel and CAD systems, streamlined parallel work, and provided global access for engineers, supply chain managers, and planning teams. The implementation by OpenBOM yielded dramatic results, with one lead engineer reporting that their weekly BOM maintenance time was reduced from 5 hours to just 10 minutes, freeing the team to focus on critical development tasks.