JIT’s impact on PLM and BOM management

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