BOMs and Better Development
In the best of product development processes, Engineering, Manufacturing and Service all come together to plan. They talk design changes and equipment changes, and field input: issues that will create the most efficient, rapid and cost-effective path from design to delivery. Periodically, they’ll come together again through the product lifecycle. They’ll discuss design changes and their impact on the technicians in the field. They’ll talk about new equipment, and how redesigns can save time and money. They’ll discuss whatever they need to keep the product development process flowing.
By establishing this association, Engineering, Manufacturing and Service together make important decisions and coordinate tasks that improve margins, decrease development time, accelerate product launch and more. But there’s something else to notice about this: Each has a unique perspective on the same topic. Engineering thinks about product function. Manufacturing thinks about production processes. Service thinks about supporting the product in the field. All three functions are impacted by the product design.
Think about something else, too. We used to turn to the mechanical CAD models as the sole source of finding that data. Today, however, we find richer data in our bills of material: eBOM, mBOM and sBOM—encompassing the three functional areas—and the transformations from one BOM to the other. In fact, this kind of associative relationship between these three roles, and their three organizations, forms the perfect model for the relationship between the Engineering Bill of Materials, the Manufacturing Bill of Materials and the Service Bill of Materials. Early awareness. Ongoing sharing of data. Real time change and configuration management and control. Each in a state of evolution, giving and receiving information that can support and improve the product through its life.
And with that association, the value of the collaboration between the three organizations is significantly greater. Now, because the association is directly between the data, updates, enhancements, supplier changes; anything that could potentially improve the product development process is in place in real time. And happily, that kind of association is possible. Working separately and together, smart companies and smart users have uncovered, explored, and created the techniques and technologies needed to create that interrelationship.
Now we have a whole different way to measure the value of this relationship between the Bills of Material
1. Reduced costs. Here, the traditional advan-ages of automation—reduced duplication of effort, increased accuracy—come into play. A structured sharing of significant data between eBOM, mBOM and sBOM is an operational imperative. Make no mistake about it, when you save significant amounts of keystrokes you save significant amounts of money.
2. Accelerated development time. By establishing a start-to-start relationship between the BOMs, downstream tasks or processes can start earlier, retooling can begin sooner, outsourcing or procurement processes started more quickly. And as things change in the course of design and manufacturing, the affected Bills of Material—and the processes they drive—are kept absolutely current.
3. Faster time to market. Maintaining the relationships between the BOMs can prevent hiccups in typical “end-of-stream” processes, like the delivery of up-to-date and accurate service procedures, parts catalogs, and training from delaying product launch.
4. Improved quality and compliance. The ability to analyze the Bills of Material will allow improved visibility to and optimization of product quality and reliability, while addressing areas of non compliance ahead of time, according to a range of international standards such as REACH.
And it goes well beyond the relationship. It touches on how deeply and accurately we can analyze the data contained in those BOMs. Data that has been mined is data that can be refined, analyzed, and turned into information that can drive profitable decisions in a number of areas: It can improve compliance by performing critical environmental compliance analyses using the data directly from the BOMs. This can prevent both delays and fines if the product fails to meet compliance standards. It can lower costs, since a critical analysis of the BOMs can uncover inefficiencies in design and manufacturing. BOMs can be explored for issues of performance, quality, and reliability: far more than can mechanical CAD models.
And think about this: the depth of information found in Bills of Material is not yet even fully utilized. Users and vendors, through the natural motion of the market, have worked together to derive so much strategic value from BOMs. We’re still doing that using methods described above and emerging technologies such as Web 2.0 to better utilize the collective knowledge of your network. We’re still taking our successes and, yes, our false starts and learning how to better use the information we find to lower costs, improve quality and accelerate time to market for all our products.
