In the apparel and footwear industry, with increasingly complex products, shorter lead times, and more advanced and varied product offerings the effective management and control of raw materials takes on a unique importance. Even the simplest product is made up of size dependent and colour dependent components which must be incorporated into an accurate and comprehensive Bill of Materials (BOM).
Companies used to have excell sheets for managing bill of materials. Excel bill of material spreadsheets can't enforce product data accuracy. There's no history of who changed something, when or why it was changed, or whether you're looking at the approved revision of each item. And working on an multi-level BOM is very difficult.
Many companies question as who owns the BOM? It is PLM or ERP ? The best candidate to own a BOM is PLM. product Designs and Engineers use the BOM in PLM.
Bill of materials management is a critical part of the design and manufacture of any product. Accurate management of the BOM eliminates production delays due to missing components. In the apparel and footwear industry the product with different sizes and color variations is built using BOM. This BOM is exported and sent to vendors as part of tech pack report for the Production.
FlexPLM provides a cost based Bill of Materials. It has got decent number of functionalities to help customers maintain their BOM's effectively.
Some of them are:
Material Constraints can be built for each section of the BOM.
CostRollup is done automatcially.
Copy and paste rows functionality.
Size, destination, Color and source variations can be maitained.
Separate Views can be created for each BOM section and ability to export to PDF and excel document.
While working on BOM, a designed can lock it to prevent other engineers to modifying it.
Some of the Gaps in current system are:
Integration - More often the BOM information is sent to the ERP downstream system for the Production. There should be an proven framework for real time integration to synchronize the BOMs across different systems.
Placeholder Materials - While working on BOM, Product designs might not have the approved materials to be added to BOM. They should be able to add a placeholder material which should get replaced automatically once the actual material is approved.
Buy and Sell - Enhanced functionality to differentiate the Make/Buy parts in the BOM.
BOM is not user friendy and technical architure is very complex to customize.
Leading companies that employ an effective BOM management solution are more able to hit product development and lifecycle targets that drive product profitability, on average, 80 percent or more of the time, versus 30 to 40 percent of the time for laggards.
BOM is a complex multi dimensional data structure ,with the kind of override complexities it contains. Also , the BOM editor in FlexPLM is great. But it is sometimes slow when there are large amount of materials in the system. Also, as saurabh mentioned there is no section level locking for the BOM while update. Which prevents two different people working on two BOM sections at the same time.
ReplyDeleteThe BOM editor needs to be changed in FlexPLM.There should be a better way.
I agree with Sadeep, the BOM is definitely advance feature of any PLM solution. In FlexPLM it made us difficult because the way it is implemented. Some times it also because of the requirement and the way customization done to BOM functionality.
ReplyDeleteHere is the Challenge : In BOM, we have synching BOM feature. You have option of 'insert' or 'replace' If you Synch a BOM that has colorway overrides with a BOM that don't have colorway overrides what is a best option? There is no meaning if you use 'insert' because you have to any way manual removal of duplicate rows. If you use 'replace' it will wipeout all colorway overrideds! How do we support the business process with better solution?