A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

JIT’s impact on PLM and BOM management

JIT’s impact on PLM and BOM management
Oleg
Oleg
21 February, 2014 | 2 min for reading

jit-plm-impact

JIT (Just in Time) is a well-known approach in manufacturing industry. In a nutshell, JIT is a production strategy to reduce inventory and associated cost. The philosophy of JIT is related to processing and transactions of inventories, which adds additional cost. By removal (or reducing) of inventories, you can reduce a total cost of production. You may ask me – where is product lifecycle management in this story? It sounds like completely “manufacturing problem” and something that shopfloor and suppliers network should be able to resolve. However, it is not true. In my view, there is tight connection between PLM implementation and JIT manufacturing planning.

Think about manufacturing planning and control. One of the functions is to get access to engineering bill of materials and use this information to create manufacturing plan – workcenter planning, suppliers orders, assembly instructions, etc. The efficient coordination between engineering environment and manufacturing planning is one of the key elements of successful production planning. Now, this is true for every manufacturing types. In most of PLM implementations it means the ability to send design or engineering BOM to manufacturing planners to work planning BOM. The difference come with specific of planning and manufacturing BOM organization related to JIT manufacturing principles.

So, what is the difference in bill of materials for JIT? The main one is significant reduce of bill of material levels. JIT reduce the number of part numbers planning and number of levels in BOM. Many part numbers that in traditional MRP practice are treated as in/out inventories now can be treated as “phantoms”. This is actually one of the main goals in JIT – to reduce complexity of detailed manufacturing planning. However, it brings a need to maintain more synchronized communication between engineering and manufacturing – literally between design/engineering and planning bill of materials.

In my view, the main challenge of PLM tools in JIT manufacturing environment is related to engineering-manufacturing collaboration. PLM implementation should be focusing on better synchronization of both development/engineering and manufacturing/planning. The implication in PLM – additional requirements to BOM tools and ECO management. Inefficient collaboration can raise the number of engineering change transactions – one of the most expensive transactions in every manufacturing company.

What is my conclusion? JIT makes manufacturing processes more connected and synchronized. It is obvious that JIT implementation impacts supply chain network. The operations between suppliers are getting more tight. However, JIT is impacting engineering and design processes too. Therefore, as much as manufacturing is moving towards lean principles, the demand for better engineering-manufacturing collaboration will increase. I can see it as a significant challenge in many PLM implementations. Specially it may impact BOM and ECO management tools. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
9 September, 2009

Why I decided to talk today about Collaborative PLM? I think “collaborative” buzz was with us quite long time, but...

6 February, 2022

Engineering and manufacturing systems are moving to the cloud. Born in the cloud, “cloud-native” systems are more efficient, scalable, and...

13 March, 2022

My recent few months were turbulent, so I’m apologizing in front of my readers for my somewhat infrequent contribution to...

15 November, 2017

Many years ago, I had a customer who asked me to develop “one button” data management application. I made a...

13 July, 2016

Historically, a business model of CAD, PDM and PLM vendors was to sell “seats”.  To sell CAD seats was a core...

7 May, 2021

Engineering.com article by Verdi Ogewell – New Leaders in Forrester’s PLM Wave: Why Siemens Will be a Tough Nut to...

8 October, 2009

Do you remember, PLM Think Tank is about future crazy ideas? So, here you go – one that I liked...

5 January, 2009

At the end of the year and at the beginning of the new year, there are a log of posts...

2 September, 2010

Summer is finally over. This is a good reason to stop talking about fancy social software and cool Apple’s features....

Blogroll

To the top