The TTM Advanced Manufacturing Group is reportedly saving significant engineering hours each week by using OpenBOM to optimize its operations.
NEWTON, Mass.—OpenBOM, a provider of cloud-based product data management (PDM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) software, said in a release that TTM Technologies’ Advanced Manufacturing Group is using OpenBOM to “enhance team effectiveness and facilitate a smooth transition from early-stage design to manufacturing.”
OpenBOM, a wholly-owned and branded product of Newman Cloud, Inc., is also the name of the company’s cloud-native digital thread platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers with their supply chain networks.
TTM Technologies is a global manufacturer of technology, engineered systems, radio frequency (RF) components, and printed circuit boards (PCBs). The company’s Advanced Manufacturing Group (AMG) supports TTM plants and business units with manufacturing research, design and creation of machine tools, and software and sensor systems.
OpenBOM is a key enabling technology for the AMG team. The platform provides a centralized location for managing product data, including BOMs, engineering change orders, and supplier information.
“At TTM, we productize the machine tools and manufacturing technology such that it becomes a proprietary part of the process,” said TTM Technologies Advanced Manufacturing Group Lead Owen Long, in the release. “The research, software, and machinery are part of our internal deliverables.”
To support plants across the globe, the TTM Advanced Manufacturing Group relies on OpenBOM to quickly move from early-stage design to manufacturing, saving numerous hours of engineering per week and allowing the team to meet the demands of its customers, the release said.
“We rely on OpenBOM to help us manage a wide range of inputs from our internal customers and quickly deliver an accurate product BOM (bill of materials) to our manufacturing floor,” Long said in the release. “We calculate ROI and savings as you would with any other (external) customer, based on effectiveness and efficiency, and OpenBOM is a large part of our team’s effectiveness.”
Long said that TTM continues to grow internally and through the acquisition of key enabling technologies for its customers. Along with the different teams and tools that have been developed, techniques that are ripe for broader scaling in TTM’s factories emerge. But they also come with a level of heterogeneity in form and completeness that could be difficult to message using conventional low-tech or high-tech PLM systems, Long explained. Open BOM allows for rapid integration of materials and editing of those bills, he said.
According to Long, TTM had old BOMs, new BOMs, BOMs in Excel, and others in text. Many have become obsolete with time or were simply incomplete. Others required tribal knowledge to be reusable.
“It wasn’t working and it didn’t scale,” Long said. “We needed a lean flexible tool to record and organize legacy products while accurately documenting what we needed to build or buy.”
After evaluating several options, TTM purchased OpenBOM for several reasons. OpenBOM’s agile approach fits nicely into TTM’s internal processes, and it allowed the team to quickly go from prototype to manufacturing.
“OpenBOM feels like it was built by engineers for engineers. We could get the BOM to the shop floor right away, and OpenBOM has everything we need without the overhead and burden of what we don’t need,” Long said. “We [also] really like the ease of use of the OpenBOM UX and UI. Our Operations team picked it up quickly, and casual users can return to OpenBOM as needed and be effective.”
Because TTM serves a market that is committed to security and protection of intellectual property (IP), the Multi-Factor Authentication option in OpenBOM is important to the company. Long added that the lean design of OpenBOM was in line with the company’s needs “from the very beginning.”
“The bottom line for TTM is the efficiency of operation. We build a mini in-house factory here to highlight the entire design digital supply chain, and OpenBOM saves us over 8 hours a week of engineering time.”