BOM: An ENOVIA V6 Perspective

BOM (Bill of Material) management discussions can get really tricky. Just perform a search on the definition of a Bill of Material and you will find a multitude of definitions out on the web. It is likely it even means different things to different people within your organization.  A CAD engineer is focused mainly on the physical structure of the product; a manufacturing engineer would be comfortable with a “As Manufactured” view of the product; the Service department may need a view into product BOM when ordering replacement parts, while, Purchasing is concerned with the latest version of BOM to make sure they are ordering the correct components. 

By now companies have accepted the reality that product creation is not a linear task going from Design department to manufacturing and beyond. All the departments (including Design, Development, Quality, and Manufacturing) provide input to the product development process, e.g. Quality might have an opinion on the types of components to be used which in turn will impact the design being produced. This increases the need for a centralized BOM management solution that provides single source of truth for the bill of materials with different “views” of the BOM for each department.  Further, the solution needs to encapsulate revision control mechanisms which follow a standard workflow, to allow all the departments to collaborate on changes.

To put things in perspective, let us analyze three key BOM definitions within ENOVIA V6 to see how it manages various BOM requirements throughout the product development lifecycle.

MultiCAD BOM

The obvious place to start would be at the designer’s desk. A designer could be using one or more types of CAD software (MCAD or ECAD), depending on the standard followed within the company or department.  Typically each of these packages generates a CAD structure, which really is a structured bill of specifications (drawings, models, etc.).  The ENOVIA Designer Central application enables designers to incorporate and manage the CAD structure within the PLM system. It also helps designers collaborate and manage their CAD data in a central location. 

Engineering BOM

The next logical step in the design process, after the design is finalized, would be to generate an EBOM.  The ENOVIA Engineering Central application working with Designer Central allows the user to generate an EBOM from a CAD structure. The EBOM provides the development teams with a single persistent definition of the product. This initial EBOM creation is a key to maintain close association between the CAD structure (physical) and Engineering structure (logical). This functionality holds significance as your EBOM structure can be generated from more than one CAD software. A typical example would be a company requiring both an ECAD and an MCAD system to design different subsystems of a mechatronic product. These two different CAD structures can now be consolidated under a single EBOM structure.

At this point, you will see that there are two views of the BOM data, once as seen by the CAD designer dealing with physical structure and drawings, and the logical view as seen by the Engineering department.  The release management process within ENOVIA Designer Central and Engineering Central helps the design and engineering departments to involve the stakeholders within the company and its supply chain in the approval cycle.

Manufacturing BOM

When an Engineering BOM is released, it creates an initial Manufacturing Bill of Material (MBOM) automatically. This functionality is part of the ENOVIA X-BOM Manufacturing module, which enables consolidated management of the engineering and manufacturing BOM data into a single enterprise solution. Each of the plants manufacturing the product can create their own plant specific MBOM, restructure it based on the manufacturing sequence and make/buy requirements. The Manufacturing department is notified of any changes to the EBOM and these can be applied automatically to the MBOM, if needed. This consolidated change process keeps engineering synchronized with manufacturing.

To top it off, each of the applications support comprehensive reporting features that enable users to generate custom views of the BOM based on their departmental needs.

As you can see, the ENOVIA V6 suite of applications can enable access of BOM data to all the necessary parties, help reduce the development and manufacturing cost by managing BOM data in a single system, and improve decision making during the product development and manufacturing lifecycle through collaboration during product creation.

Please contact us if you would like to get an in-depth overview of BOM management capabilities within ENOVIA V6.

Tags: BOM, EBOM, ECAD, ENOVIA V6, ENOVIA V6 Designer Central, ENOVIA V6 Engineering Central, MBOM, MCAD, xBOM