Bill of Materials (BOMs)

A products’ Bill of Materials (BOM) is a centralized source of information for any manufacturing company. In fact, it is the key to manufacturing agility, following customer requests for a growing number of product variants. A fit-for-purpose BOM ensures a seamless flow of information across the organization, from engineering, sourcing and manufacturing to service. The BOM is vital to ensure simplified processes, lower margin of error, faster time to market and lower costs.

This article will elaborate on the benefits of using differentiated BOMs for Engineering and Manufacturing. Controlling the BOMs digitally in a fit-for-purpose environment will ensure that the BOM information is accurate and timely – at all times.

1. What is an Engineering Bill of Materials (eBOM)

The creation of Engineering BOMs, or in short, eBOMs, was introduced with 3D CAD systems and later used with PLM systems. Engineering BOMs inherit the BOM structure of the Engineering Objects and reflect the assemblance of parts or components, related to the design of a product.

The eBOM provides an image of how a given object should appear once it’s produced and aligns relevant information such as materials, items, sub-assemblies and components for the creation of said object.

The eBOM is a resemblance of a product structure’s 3D model and is usually driven from 3D CAD systems and saved in a PLM system. The structure of the CAD objects created in 3D CAD is what the eBOM depicts in PLM. To this, Engineers will add relevant 2D documentation such as work instructions, manuals or technical drawings.

2. What is a Manufacturing Bill of Materials (mBOM)

The mBOM is a representation of a product’s production BOM and is the extension to the BOM structure of the eBOM. With this, an organization principally describes how the assembly of parts and components from an eBOM is produced and what is needed to do so.

Besides the fact that the mBOM essentially is driven by the eBOM, the structure will in most cases not be a complete replicate. Manufacturing Engineers will gain access to both BOM structures and create the mBOM by rearranging the positioning of BOM lines, based on the eBOM. In this process, the engineers will bring together recurring components, to accommodate production and, at times, even break down the structure to groups, if some production steps are outsourced and performed by external vendors.

Specifically, the BOM describes the ideal approach and routes of professionals and materials to manufacture a product by detailing the building, assembling and packing.

Moreover, because this BOM contains all that makes the final product, both soft- and firmware i.e., non-tangible items, as well as custom and off-the-shelf items are included in the final mBOM.

The sole purpose of having an mBOM is to detail how a given product is manufactured. Therefore, the organizational benefits of having a structured mBOM are self-explanatory, whereas the disadvantages of not having one will result in slow, incorrect or unreliable product information and inefficient production.

The mistreatment of a bill of materials for manufacturing will create a snowball-effect, that will impact the material for a prod-uct, production or ordering of components and expenses. In time, not valuing a structured production process will partially or completely paralyze a company’s production and companies will be left with a redundancy of unusable material and com-ponents that will tie liquidity to inventories and drain company finances, instead of gaining revenue.

If Manufacturing Engineers, or the likes, do not have the trans-parency to directly construct and compare an mBOM with the respective eBOM, data and information might be incorrectly documented, wrongfully placed or not even documented or placed at all. Mistakes like these e.g., typos in naming or quan-tity, however minor they might sound, will have major conse-quences to companies.

As previously mentioned, the full process of developing a company-specific version of Bluestar PLM includes company “super-users”. The development process also accounts for the final steps of development e.g., the migration phase. Here, the involvement of “super-users” is likewise decisive and ensures that the final PLM/ERP deployment accommodates each user specified need. This process consists of a series of reoccurring events across a period of months.

For a company to perform such a transcend and for the system to be delivered, regardless of the magnitude of data and com-pany size, it will take more than training super-users and accom-modating data. Early adopters of Bluestar PLM/Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM ERP, supported by the principle of flipping the company hi-erarchy and these expressing the need for change upstream, will lead the initial change. From the incipient implementation stage “super-users” are responsible for the training and engagement of the early adopters in the company departments. Through this way of organically distributing knowledge and adopting to the solution, the early adopters will further help the remainder of the organization become familiar with the solution.

The structure of 3D items, components, parts, assemblies and sub-assemblies, designed and pieced together by engineers in CAD is reflected as the eBOM in Bluestar PLM. With Bluestar PLM, organizations can gather products on one source of truth and have the ability to govern these throughout the entirety of their lifecycle. Transparency greatly benefits, not only the creation of the eBOM, but also the product in its future journey towards production. Because of such transparency amongst entities, from engineering to production, objects and object structures will at all times be aligned, keeping product data synced and ensuring correct and up to data transfer.

Once the eBOM is created, engineers and the likes, responsi-ble of production, will in fact access Bluestar PLM to utilize the transparency and generate the mBOM. Deriving from the eBOM structure, the mBOM inherits the product rules of the eBOM, that dictates the selection criteria of alternative BOM lines.

What is unique to the relation between eBOMs and mBOMs in Bluestar PLM/D365 F&SCM, is the way these are compared and synchronized. Traditionally, the production responsible will not have access to a PLM-system, hence neither eBOMs. However, because Bluestar PLM is completely embedded in D365 F&SCM, the representatives will be able to have complete access to the eBOM in Bluestar PLM, where they can create the mBOM, prior to releasing it for production. While doing so, they will have the ability to synchronize product items, from one BOM to another, and validate that all items from the eBOM are correctly repre-sented in the mBOM as they are in the eBOM.

Upon the creation of the mBOM, the reflected structure of the eBOM might be rearranged. The position of some components might be changed and some might even be clustered.

This will not change the actual structure of the product, but it is done so that production is streamlined, because the given components are either produced before others or are duplicates of the same, e.g., screws. Moreover, upon the comparison of the two, representatives will identify the need for unique additional material e.g., glues, solvents, packaging etc.

CAD users gets direct access to ERP data directly from the CAD system. Users in the supply chain have access to related information on BOMs and items, allowing everybody to work with the same set of information.

Collaborate efficiently across destributed multi-discipline engineering and manufacturing teams, as well as sub-suppliers and the extended enterprise.

Unifies data in the CAD, PDM and ERP inside Dynamics 365 F&SCM, bringing an end to manual data entry and the existence of redundant data.

By minimizing the time spent on clerical tasks, such as manually transferring data to other teams, the engineering team can spend time where it is most valuable: executing projects and perfecting designs.

By automatically updating changes to product data, the task of manual data handling is reduced, leading to fewer errors.

Paves the way for an easy implementation of ERP-based PLM in the future that is integrated with your existing PDM and CAD tools.

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