PI Munich: How to develop “single BOM” strategy

I’m attending PI Congress event in Munich these days. There are lot of interesting information and presentation. If you follow my Twitter or #PIMunich hash tag, you can find some comments and slides that I shared earlier today.

This afternoon, I had an honor to share my thoughts and ideas related to development “single BOM” management strategies and data integration in manufacturing organization.

To create, maintain and share Bill of Material in your organization is one of the most complicated process in every manufacturing organization. Understanding your company processes is a first step into better organization of Bill of Material. At the same time, BOM is not a spreadsheet you can pass into organization. BOM is a fundamental data structure in product design, development, manufacturing, support and maintenance.

My presentations and slides below are outlining some of the experience and observations I collected for the last year of my consulting business. It covers best practices and challenges of management of Bill of Materials in any manufacturing organization.

BOM creation and transfer remains a big challenge for a smooth PLM deployment. Many are wary of bringing BOM management into PLM as it can raise a lot of challenges in management, time and cost. However, with the demand for better integration and collaboration, companies soon may not have a choice as they attempt to close the loops between engineering and manufacturing.

Here are three level of my Single BOM maturity model:

1- Share: access and edit the same Bill of Materials

2- Reference: connect multiple elements of product information (BOMs)

3- Query: retrieve on-demand BOM information from diverse systems and data sources.

What is my conclusion? Single BOM is not a product. It is a vision and maturity model that enables to create a consistent way to create, update and share Bill of Materials in manufacturing organization. It is an integrated approach. The success is dependent on multiple factors – business processes, technology, PLM products and specifics of existing implementations. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg