The Bill of Materials is a fundamental part of product development. Traditionally, CAD and design were considered as a source of all product information. But this status quo is changing fast as product development is moving into a multi-discipline zone. None of the modern products are purely mechanical products. Each product today includes some electrical parts, electronic, embedded and cloud software. Even the most sophisticated MCAD is not capable to manage an entire structure of the information about the product.
And this is a place where OpenBOM is coming and proposing very simple, yet flexible and reliable recipe management capable to include multi-disciplinary item data management (OpenBOM catalogs) and Bill of Materials (parent-child relationships).
Read more about OpenBOM data management in this online article – OpenBOM data management fundamentals. You will learn about to main models of OpenBOM – reference/instance model and parent-child relationships.
Check this model for reference/instance.
Today, I want to talk about a very important enhancement we are planning to make in OpenBOM revision management mechanism.
Current OpenBOM revisions are immutable snapshots that capable to store a baseline of BOMs. A Bill of Materials in the OpenBOM model considered a flat list of items. Each item can potentially point on another BOM (Part Number) and by doing so, parent-child relationships are unfolding.
OpenBOM Parent-Child Relationships are built using Part Numbers. You can think about them as fully interchangeable parts. A history of assembly (BOM) revisions and part revisions is fully preserved. The limit of this model is to manage relationships between assembly (BOM) revisions. And this is what we are going to fix.
Think about the following structure (each item in this structure has Part Number):
However, this structure lack some of the capabilities – a way to interlink a parent with a specific revision and a child of a specific revision. Now, let’s add revisions to this structure. This is an example of what you’re going to see
The revision process can happen bottom-up and top-down. Below is one example of a simple scenario when sub-assembly was revisioning first and later was included in the revision of the top assembly.
OpenBOM first set of revision model enhancements will be coming in the next release. Stay tuned. More information will be available soon.
Meantime, I want to invite you to attend the OpenBOM weekly educational webinar about revision management. The webinar will take place this Wednesday at 2 pm Eastern U.S. time.
Subject: BOM Revisions – Methods to get started managing revisions of Bills of Materials
When: Wed, Feb 19, 2020 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EST
Managing revisions of items and bill of materials can be a challenging task, especially for complicated multi-level BOMs. Join me, Steve Hess, OpenBOM Director of User Experience in a discussion of BOM revision management. We will examine the various methods and theories used in keeping track of individual BOM revisions, Part revision and connecting them together in a meaningful and understandable way. We will be answering that age-old questions “What components went into a particular revision of my product?”
Conclusion.
To manage the Bill of Materials and all its revision is a complex task. Nothing is simple about revision management in BOMs. But, at OpenBOM we are focusing on how to make this process easy and simple.
Please follow our revision model development and future articles. If you’re interested to share your experience or bring some feedback, please reach me out – oleg [at] openbom [dot] com.
Check out how OpenBOM can help you to do so. Register for OpenBOM user subscription later today
Best, Oleg @ openbom dot com.
Let’s get to know each other better. If you live in the Greater Boston area, I invite you for a coffee together (coffee is on me). If not nearby, let’s have a virtual coffee session — I will figure out how to send you a real coffee.
Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my Beyond PLM blog and PLM Book website
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