A couple of things:

• W/r/t your data structure: personally, I always prefer a hash of records, with each of those records being a hash reference of columns and values. Whereas yours is the other way round. Does that make sense? In other words, I'd prefer

      $foo{3}{NAME1}
  [download]

  instead of

      $foo{NAME1}{3}
  [download]

  But that's just me.
• Don't read the entire file into an array; just loop over each line and process it as necessary.
• Returning a reference would be less memory-intensive.
• A hash slice would be nice for setting the values. But that would really only work with the data structure I prefer (that which I outlined above).
• When you return on an error, you don't have to explicitly return 0.

That all said, here's my rewrite:

    sub OpenFF {
        my($file, $dlmt) = @_;
        $dlmt = "\t" unless defined $dlmt;

        my $hash = {};

        open READ, $file or return;
        chomp(my $head = <READ>);
        my @headers = split $dlmt, $head;

        while (<READ>) {
            chomp;
            my @columns = split $dlmt;
            @{$hash->{$columns[0]}}{@headers} = @columns;
        }
        close READ;

        return $hash;
    }
[download]

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