A robust bill of materials (BOM) is essential for today’s manufacturing operations. The BOM helps facilitate improved communication and ensures the completion of manufacturing processes. Teams looking to remain competitive in today’s manufacturing market should consider investing in modern bill of materials software solutions to support their operations.
The Basics of Bill of Materials Software
The BOM includes the core information needed to manufacture products. It helps define the product and all the parts required to build it, including the raw materials, assemblies, components, and quantities.
Modern manufacturing organizations now need to do more than just manage product part structure lists. They must manage all the information associated with the product definition, including any electronic, mechanical, or software components. This information is often managed across disparate systems creating data silos.
Manufacturers must break down these silos and figure out how to maintain up-to-date data within a single system. Modern bill of materials software includes advanced tools for BOM management, which associates all the data with a product throughout its lifecycle so it can be easily updated, maintained, and shared. Selecting the solutions is crucial to manufacturing success.
The Top 5 Benefits of Bill of Materials Software
1. Faster Product Data Delivery
Today’s technical products involve multiple teams, each with its own set of stakeholders. In traditional manufacturing processes, teams must wait for the previous team’s work to complete their tasks. This often creates an insufficient and unsustainable waiting game.
However, modern bill of materials software solutions include simple lifecycle or maturity management access control. This means that as a product definition is being developed, teams can “promote” information into states that are useable and accessible to critical teams so they can move forward with their tasks.
Modern bill of materials solutions provide up-to-date information to key teams to significantly improve collaboration and efficiency across product development.
2. Simplified Management of BOM Structures
BOMs can be created using various sources (multi-CAD tools, Excel, etc.) and built using different structures based on the product and sales strategy to get the product to market (assemble to stock, assemble to order, engineer to order). BOM variants are generated based on customer needs, but each structure needs to be effectively supported and managed without creating duplicate parts or causing issues.
A robust bill of materials software will help you manage these variants using a modular and configurable approach. The BOM structure is tied to logic driven from product requirements. The modularity is leveraged downstream needs to deliver a standard product definition for all teams, further enhancing efficiency by reducing the number of late loopbacks, design churns, and more.
A modular, configurable approach to BOM makes it easier for teams to scale products to meet customer needs.
3. Effectively Manage BOM Configurations
It’s normal for multiple BOM variations to be created throughout the development cycle. Unfortunately, managing these variations across disconnected systems means there’s no clear way to get a comprehensive look at all the data.
Bill of materials software provides additional visibility into how a product evolves and what information is available to all teams as development continues. This makes it easy for each team to collect and gather all relevant product data for their needs, including tools to compare BOM variants to prevent issues.
4. Easily Visualize Parts, Data, and Products
A comprehensive bill of materials software solution should include tools to visualize configurations in 3D, perform interface checking, compare products visually, and more. These visualizations of products and parts support effective collaboration during product development. Stakeholders can use them to get a clear overview and understanding of a product’s status. They can also be used for part recognition to simplify downstream process management.
5. Reduce Costs and Reuse Parts
Creating new product parts can be expensive, making reuse an essential strategy for reducing costs. Besides the monetary benefits, reusing parts simplifies inventory management and improves supply chain utilization.
Bill of materials software provides the data structure needed for improved part classification and supplier management.
Get Started with Bill of Materials Software
Bill of materials software is a core component of Windchill PLM from PTC. It generates a BOM that acts as the single source of truth for all product data throughout the development process. In addition, Windchill includes the tools you need to support your larger digital transformation strategies.
By implementing Windchill, your team has everything they need to capture, configure, and manage product information within your BOM. All the tools come together to increase efficiency while reducing costs and creating better products.
