Threaded Miami: Oleg Shilovitsky of OpenBOM

What if the biggest problem in product development is not CAD, not PLM, and not even ERP — but the messy handoff between them?

In this episode, Oleg Shilovitsky of OpenBOM goes straight at one of the least glamorous but most expensive problems in manufacturing: engineering creates the product, then execution starts with spreadsheets, PDFs, disconnected files, and tribal knowledge scattered across departments. Procurement gets the wrong unit of measure, maintenance loses the original reasoning behind a change, and costly mistakes hit the business immediately. 

Oleg explains how OpenBOM was built around that disconnect. His argument is simple: most companies still run on files, and despite all the cloud talk, a huge share of CAD data is still trapped in desktop environments like SOLIDWORKS. That means the real challenge is not forcing companies into a giant new platform, but giving them a simpler way to organize product data, preserve context, and move information cleanly across engineering, procurement, suppliers, and operations. 

The new angle is AI. Oleg introduces OpenBOM’s new file agent for SOLIDWORKS, designed to work inside the reality companies already have instead of demanding a painful rip-and-replace transformation. The agent is built to capture revisions, manage file-based workflows, and collect the context that usually gets lost in emails, memory, or half-documented records. He frames this as the start of a broader “product memory” strategy: capture information, review it intelligently, and then flow it to the people and systems that need it. 

He also lays out what comes next: review agents that analyze BOMs before release, catch errors, and help route clean information into ERP systems, contractors, and suppliers. That sounds basic until you remember how much engineering time and procurement time gets burned every day cleaning up preventable mistakes. 

This is a conversation about a very unfashionable problem with very real dollar impact. If you care about BOMs, file-based CAD, engineering handoff, procurement errors, AI agents in PLM, or the gap between design and execution, this one is worth hearing.

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