IDEO engineering design consultancy gets smart about its BoMs

IDEO, the innovation and design consultancy famous for its work on US Amtrak’s high-speed Acela train and the new Handspring PDAs, says it expects to greatly streamline its distributed product development processes with bom.com, a relatively new web-based application designed to let companies manage that data centrally around a bill-of-materials (BoM). bom.com is interesting inasmuch as it provides what could be a very useful complement to existing PDM (product data management) and ERP/MRP (manufacturing enterprise resource planning) systems, particularly for design consultancies and engineer-to-order firms. It effectively unifies fragmented product development teams and their remote suppliers into one ‘design chain’ via the web of virtual private networks. It’s not about sharing and markup of engineering drawing information – although the system already integrates with SolidWorks 3D CAD for importing and synchronising part and assembly files, and other MCAD and ECAD additions are in the pipeline. So it doesn’t do quite what traditional PDM does. It is about establishing a shared and always dynamic bill of materials – the set of data that defines the specifications, procure, price, lead time and general ‘make’ side of a product – as the central framework around which all design and development communication occurs. And in this sense it’s similar to Dassualt Systemes; SmarTeam SmartBOM product, launched late last year. IDEO says it’s this that will improve the speed and effectiveness of collaboration both internally across departments and externally throughout its distributed design and build chains by giving everyone involved – including clients and suppliers – real-time access to the same set of up to date information. It says it will thus deal with the pressures of short product development cycles, communication across multiple design partners, outsourced manufacturing, and the need ultimately to hand off a clean BoM to its clients. “The web-native architecture of bom.com will make it possible for our geographically dispersed design and manufacturing teams to work together seamlessly,” says David Strong, chief financial officer at IDEO. And he adds: “bom.com is an affordable solution that is easy to implement and easy to use.” Cost of ownership is low since there is no need to buy, install, upgrade or maintain software – it’s all served over the web. “The tool’s robust functionality will greatly enhance the service we provide our clients.” Evidently, IDEO came across bom.com when the latter sought the firm’s feedback early in the development of its software last year. Several months later and as the application took shape, IDEO was convinced that it was the way to go to ‘bring together’ engineers and project managers throughout its design studios, contract manufacturers and suppliers and clients. IDEO says it will use the system create private and secure workspaces for each of its clients’ products in development, to establish Chinese walls and ensure no compromising of proprietary data. Most important, when design is finished, it will hand off complete specifications, documentation and sourcing information simply by turning over the project workspace to the client. IDEO also plans to use the bom.com Supplier Access module, which will allow it to provide individual suppliers with private windows into relevant product data.