Bill of material Management white paper


Introduction

Any company that manufactures a product probably has a bill Materials, or more likely more the one. How the company manages this information is crucial to the success of the company. At a seminar a long time ago I heard a speaker ask "Who owns the bill Materials in your company?" Some people answered engineering some people answered manufacturing and other people answered configuration Management. The speaker said, "Actually the correct answer is the company owns the bulk material!" The bill of Materials is the company's primary asset, if it is lost or corrupted the company is out of business!

How to structure?

The classic answer to Bill of Materials is to keep it simple. This is often more easily said than done. I would refer the reader to a great book called Bill of Materials structured for excellence. In this book the author discusses how company can manage with one Bill of Materials. For some companies this is very difficult especially when using computer-aided design (CAD) and Product Data Management (PDM). CAD and PDM use closely related but subtly different structures. A conscious effort in designing and maintaining products is needed to consolidate manufacturing and engineering into one of Bill of Materials. The resistance to this change in some companies can be huge.

A less elegant solution that is proposed by most PDM systems is to use multiple bills of materials or multiple views of a single Bill of Materials. A number of challenges arise from this solution. The major challenge is bom reconciliation. What is meant by reconciliation? Usually manufacturing Bill of Materials (MBOM) and engineering Bill of Materials (EBOM) vary significantly. Either of these two bills can be changed and sophisticated tools to compare and determine the differences are needed.

Another tool that is of great use is the ability to markup a Bill of Materials. A number of PDM tools have this functionality.

The final challenge with multiple views is which one is transferred to the company's ERP system. Should there be a specific bill for this purpose or should the manufacturing Bill be transferred?

Ownership ownership ownership!

The major problem with the transferring information between systems is which system owns data. The easiest solution is to choose one of the systems and designate that one as the master. The other alternative is more complicated because if both systems can act as the master it is harder to insure data integrity.

One idea is to keep the engineering view in PDM and the manufacturing view in ERP. In this scenario you export the engineering view to ERP and then restructure and add phantoms in ERP. Another way to do this would be to create both at the engineering and Manufacturing views in PDM and then just transfer the manufacturing you to ERP. The choice depends on

how easy it is to restructure the bill of Materials in the ERP system (this is sometimes quite difficult).

reconciliation of changes for example if the engineering view changes how do the changes get transferred to ERP? The situation is slightly simplify its both views are in the PDM system, however this depends on whether the PDM systems has a good bom reconciliation facilities.

The process of integration between ERP and PDM systems will be discussed in a future white paper.

BOM line attributes

BOM line Attributes also present a challenge. What do I mean by a bom-line attributes? This refers to Attributes that are associated with a specific line (or usage) on the bill of material. The most obvious example is quantity, quantity is associated not with the part but with the instance of the part in a bill of material. Another example is the use of "reference designators" in the electronics industry. PDM systems need to be able to accommodate as many of these attributes as necessary. Obviously these attributes must be available on transfer to an ERP system. This issue also plays into the customisation scenario that will be discussed in the future white paper.

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