Modular BOM
Recently I was working with a customer for their overall PLM Audit & giving direction for their future direction for PLM. One interesting thing I observed is the way this customer manages the whole product BOM.
They have concept of Modular BOM. The concept is very interesting for me to just put forward as a new view towards managing BOM.
They have concept of Modules which are associated with the features which determines the product. So the whole Structure of a BOM is more like structure of Features. While the change in Part changes & EC process runs at the individual Module level, the whole BOM need not go through the change processes for changes at the sub Module level. What this gives as a flexibility to develop each Module separately based on the Feature requirements and don’t worry about rest of the system till integration. All these features can be used in any other product as is.
My feeling is that this is a good approach but has limitations, like not having clear view of BOM till very late in the lifecycle of the product which can be detected only during integration or there can be a tendency to misuse features in other product, to name a few.
Conclusion: My view is this is a good concept and can be developed in a good strategy for simplifying BOM management. These are my observations….
Recently I was working with a customer for their overall PLM Audit & giving direction for their future direction for PLM. One interesting thing I observed is the way this customer manages the whole product BOM. They have concept of Modular BOM. The concept is very interesting for me to just put forward as a…
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This Model is Smart way of managing the variant with in Product family. Have come across clients, who have been using this model.
Another Case, This Model is a most commonly used in Managing Software product and Software integration with Hardware.
It a crude form of managing variants without Configurators.
Major disadvantage, Can figure Number of variants. If one tries to sit and figure out number of NPI projects invested in variants and number of variants generating revenue. One, can conclude, whether Organization is loosing money in undesired variants that generates hardly any revenue.
Compare engineering BOM vs Sales BOM.
Another Disadvantage, It calls for Human intervention to identify, Alternate and Substitute parts.
Paritosh,
Thanks for your comments. The model used is a different way, and can give a single view of BOM to all departments. It needs to be explored and matured.
I would like to disagree on Crude way of managing without configurator, rather this mechanism can make use of configurator in much more efficient way.
Rahul
Some what same concept is explained in ‘Concepts and an Implementation for Product Data Management’ a PhD thesis of Hannu Peltonen