ENOVIA SmarTeamPart 2: Making BOM Management Pay Off

By Oleg Shilovitsky

As noted in part 1 of “ENOVIA SmarTeam: Instant PLM for SMBs,” (DE, July 2009) BOM management is significantly more far reaching than simply being a list of engineering or manufacturing supplies. BOM management can’t exist in a vacuum, and is nearly always associated with business processes and systems, most commonly enterprise resource planning (ERP),  product data management (PDM), PLM, and 3D CAD. Because EBOM (engineering BOM)  and MBOM (manufacturing BOM) don’t match each other exactly, companies oftentimes have problems communicating BOM definitions to their engineering and manufacturing departments, made all the more complicated by the fact that the MBOM is usually stored in an ERP system, thereby forcing engineers to send the EBOM to the ERP system and reconcile the differences manually (a time-consuming, costly, and error-prone process). And sometimes, engineering product structures are completely incompatible with ERP systems because of outdated technology.

  Assuring synchronization between EBOMs and MBOMs and actually treating them as different views of a unified single BOM is a critical business objective; misalignment between them can cause errors in costing, wrong inventories, and mistakes in production that lead to quality issues, rework,  and scrap as well as delays in delivery. Using PLM to synchronize the BOMs will optimally resolve these issues.

Managing complex product structures with the SmarTeam BOM Editor.

The Challenge
S&C Electric Company, which makes circuit-switches,  capacitor controls, insulators, static compensators, and uninterruptible power supplies for electrical power system providers around the world, was extracting parts data and BOM listings from design drawings and manually copying them onto other forms at the conclusion of each design process. An outdated document management system in the engineering department was incompatible with the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in manufacturing. Not only was this an extremely time-consuming process, but a considerable amount of important information was contained in paper documents stashed in various places across the company.

The process was causing some major business challenges for S&C, including costly delays as a result of searching for documents in disparate repositories; parts, data, and BOM information requiring manual copying; errors resulting from outdated document versions; and manual information flow from engineering to manufacturing (resulting in errors, time delays, cost overruns, and version control issues).

Inefficient Communication
“The cumbersome ways of keeping track of information in all these disjointed sets of data and documents meant that people throughout the organization spent large amounts of time searching for information, verifying its accuracy across multiple versions, and converting the data to a format they could use,” says Alec Gil, manager of engineering systems for S&C. “Communication between the various groups was slow and inefficient. Usually,  people would exchange paper documents and manually copy the data they needed. That kind of redundant work wasted valuable time and was prone to error. Also,  there was always a risk of incorrect or outdated information being used.”  Founded in 1911, the global provider of equipment also provides testing facilities and engineering services for electric utilities. And in order to stick to its guiding principle of maintaining and supporting relationships with suppliers, partners, and employees, S&C decided it was time to automate BOM management.

S&C Electric uses PLM to store and review product history.

The Digital Enterprise
”S&C is on its way to eliminating these problems through the use of a collaborative product data management system,” says Gil. Collaborative PDM enables companies to get their enterprise data under digital control by capturing product information in integrated computer-based systems and exchanging it electronically between organizational stakeholders and across distributed facilities.

  S&C selected ENOVIA SmarTeam software as the PLM-centric collaborative PDM solution for this initiative. In the first phase of implementation, the system was set up to manage more than 80,000 engineering drawings, in addition to legacy files from earlier work created with a variety of design systems. “We selected this particular solution because it handles data from a variety of CAD systems and databases,” says Gil, who oversaw the implementation of the integrated engineering BOM management/ERP system environment. “We needed a tool not just to store drawings, but to manage a wide range of information concerning product structures and relationships between parts. This functionality is especially important to S&C because of the huge amount of interrelated data involved in our 500 product lines, with many of our BOMs containing nearly 2,000 components and some having as many as 100,000.”

  S&C now has a solution that offers multi-CAD data management from a single repository; fast retrieval of accurate data using powerful search capabilities; data reusability (throughout the lifecycle of the information); implementation of standard business processes throughout the extended enterprise; and automatic process-based data synchronization from PDM to ERP.

  S&C uses the software’s capacity to manage the entire body of complex product information—including the hierarchical presentation of components, assemblies, and subassemblies in the final product—to says Gil,  link engineering to manufacturing. In general, collaborative PDM software,  which manages data for each product throughout its lifecycle (PLM-centric)  provides a tight integration between PDM and ERP by exchanging and synchronizing data between the two. In this way, part data can be automatically extracted from the PDM system and transferred seamlessly to ERP, hence simplifying the export of EBOMs to ERP repositories. Moreover, the metadata,  managed in ENOVIA SmarTeam and transferred to the ERP system based on the predetermined process triggers, governs operational behavior of the company’s Items and Bills of Materials. Letting each different kind of user simultaneously work on the items that are relevant to them and all update one uniform BOM instance in the cPDM repository significantly facilitates S&C’s product development process.

Beyond CAD Data
The scope of information managed by S&C’s collaborative Bill of Materials strategy goes beyond EBOM and CAD data. The company’s bills include technical data such as component specifications, and downstream production process data requirements such as items that indicate the need for CNC programs and tooling.“By capturing this critical information—items, bills,  and engineering change orders (ECOs)—and managing the files within a PDM system as part of a broader PLM system, we’ll have a valuable historical record for each project throughout the product lifecycle,” says Gil. “We can see quickly where we stand and also won’t need to reinvent the wheel for subsequent projects. People throughout the enterprise can benefit from working concurrently in a collaborative PDM environment, engineers as well as personnel on the shop floor, in sales, field service, marketing, procurement, and other departments.” 

In PLM, 2D drawings are stored and viewed in project context without native application.

True Value of PDM within PLM for BOM Management
Some of S&C’s results include efficient data flow,  reductions in time spent searching for product data, up-to-date synchronized EBOM and MBOM information accessible from the PLM and ERP systems, and more timely and streamlined business processes across product design and manufacturing departments. These have translated into better products delivered to market faster, streamlined engineering and manufacturing processes,  increased innovation, and the elimination of costly errors.

“We see collaborative PDM within a PLM framework as a process solution that enables us to maintain our competitive strength,” says Gil. “In that sense, the technology doesn’t need to be cost-justified but is rather considered to be a ‘must’ in supporting our business objectives,  reaching long-term corporate goals, and enabling continuous improvements.”

More Info:
Dassault Systèmes
Paris, France

S&C Electric Company
Chicago, IL

Oleg Shilovitsky is chief technology officer at Dassault Systemes ENOVIA SmarTeam, where he oversees product planning, design, and innovation. Read his blog at plmtwine.com. Send comments about this article to [email protected].