Do we need multi-faceted BOM compare?

The following blog article by Anurag Batra drove my attention today – “Comparing BOM Structures: a multi-faceted need”. Author is asking if “BOM comparison” is needed function in PLM system and especially interested about “multi-faceted” Bill of Material comparison. He is asking these questions in context of enhancements made in new Agile 9.3. He wrote – “Most PDM, PLM and ERP systems offer the ability to compare Bills of Material structures side by side. Agile have had a BOM Comparison report for many years – it allowed for comparison of multiple BOM structures side by side. With 9.3, we’ve enhanced the report greatly – focusing on the use case of deep multi-level comparison between two BOM structures”. Later in this article Anurag explains new features, how possible to compare multiple levels of multiple release changes etc. According to him Agile 9.3 version provides excellent features that improve capability to compare Bill of Materials in multiple ways. I’ve been a bit confused in the end of Anurag’s post by his question to readers, how they actually compare BOMs and what can be possible use cases for new introduced reports…

Here is my Think Tank question… Do we really want to compare Bill of Materials? Except the fact that we always excited by features and capabilities of our software, I guess comparison is a very complex task. Each time I’m trying to compare structures, I feel unsecured. To compare multi-level structures that include multiple changes is very complicated, in my view. I’d be very interested in see examples of multi-faceted BOM comparison Anurag is talking about…

Here is my view:
1.  Bill of Material comparison is very complicated task.

2. Designers and Engineers are less interesting “to compare”, but more interesting to find difference between two versions of designs of product structures.

3. May be we need to think about functions in our software that provide “results” and not put users in complicated scenarios of comparing multiple structures?

I’m looking forward your responses and open discussion…

Best, Oleg