Dealing with Variation in BOM

Question

Dealing with Variation in BOM

P M (Mechanical)

(OP)

14 Jul 20 15:18

Hello everyone, I hope your day is going well.

I'm a summer intern at a large company, and I am currently working on a project where I am creating a BOM for one of our assemblies. A question that has come up during this project is how to deal with the issue of variation in these assemblies. Currently, the BOM is in Excel, but if PLM is a viable option then we can use it. However, other third party software will not be an option.

My question then is this: how is variation in assemblies typically reflected in BOMs? If anyone has any good resources for me to read about this topic please don't hesitate to link me to them! I appreciate your help and I apologize if I wasn't sufficiently clear in my explanation of the problem.

3DDave (Aerospace) · Answer 1 · 2020-07-14 16:16:58

It depends on the variation. If the variation makes the assembly work differently then there should be a unique BOM for that assembly. If the variation is because equivalent parts are substituted then it's best to create a document with a unique part number and on that drawing list the requirements to be considered equivalent. If you mean that alternate parts are selected, then the typical action is to create serial numbers for the assemblies and maintain an As-Built-List for each assembly.

EdStainless (Materials) · Answer 2 · 2020-07-14 20:03:25

We used tabulated BoMs with alternates having a suffix on the part number. We really only had two parts that could be changed, but one of those had 3 options so we only had 6 different assemblies.
This was critical to use from a service life point of view. We could tell which options were not worth the changes.

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CWB1 (Mechanical) · Answer 3 · 2020-07-20 21:59:04

Simple, if you change a part to create another similar assembly to provide a product option then you need a new assembly part number. IOW, a change at the bottom drives what is largely a numbering exercise up through the product structure to the top, effectively giving two very similar products with two different p/ns. The real beauty of PLM is when its integrated with a good CAD system and setup correctly, not only does it manage the part numbering change but can also be used to auto-generate assembly prints and simplify the entire process down to a few minutes work + approvals.

IRstuff (Aerospace) · Answer 4 · 2020-07-20 22:17:30

Whatever you choose, do NOT choose leaving it with an unchanged assembly number; there is not worse than trying to debug a particular configuration, only to realize, after days of futile debug work, that the configuration was different than expected.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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mfgenggear (Aerospace) · Answer 5 · 2020-07-25 18:45:19

at general dynamics we would create synthetic parts # to adjust for the different customer requirements , added parts, different paint.
engineering would create BOM for each of the synthetic part with a different dash #
so it was always set

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Dealing with Variation in BOM