Managing Parts and BOMs
Managing Parts and BOMs
(OP)
There are a host of ways to manage components and Bills-Of-Material. Smaller companies often use spreadsheets; others use PDM - Product Data Management - systems (I hesitate to call most of them PLM systems yet) which were either internally developed or are commercial (by the likes of Agile, Arena, PTC, MatrixOne, and others).
What do you use? What's good about it? What doesn't it do that you'd like it to? How do you exchange information with your manufacturing partners (if you use contract manufacturers)?
What do you use? What's good about it? What doesn't it do that you'd like it to? How do you exchange information with your manufacturing partners (if you use contract manufacturers)?
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Mike Kirschner
Design Chain Associates, LLC
http://www.designchainassociates.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
One of the other goals was to have this program run in the background so information could be added as a person worked to help document what was done and the resources used for the decisions made. That way reinventing the wheel could be eliminated, and leveraging good ideas made easier.
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
By the way, there are some commercial PDM systems that don't cost a huge amount of money and actually interface with SolidWorks.
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Mike Kirschner
Design Chain Associates, LLC
http://www.designchainassociates.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
We need a company and product that helps reduce these long term maintenance cost. If you know of such a product, I would like to know.
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
Most "PLM" systems are just PDM systems...it's more marketing hype than anything else at this point, IMHO. PLM manages all aspects of a product's lifecycle, not just the BOM and associated documentation and ECOs. Most systems don't manage the front-end "stage-gate" process for product development at all, for instance. Agile just acquired a startup called ProductFactory to fill in that blank in their product line.
Regarding the "blank page" problem, that's something we've discussed with several PDM suppliers and many OEMs. It's a widespread problem - every company reinvents their own approach when it's unnecessary in at least 90% of the cases; the PDM suppliers’ customers complain to them about it but they’re software companies – they don’t have the requisite detailed knowledge to be able to define a set of standards their customers can use. So we've just announced availability of a part numbering standard (see http://www.designchainassociates.com/pra/061303ipn.html ) that will be available next month and are also working on description and classification/property standards that will be available later in the year.
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Mike Kirschner
Design Chain Associates, LLC
http://www.designchainassociates.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
The engineers at my company (myself included) like using a program called P&V (Parts and Vendors). I like the user interface to this one much more. Our company assigns its own part number to any parts we have and assign them to certain catogories. P&V can manage all of this and keeps track of Manufacturer and Vendor part numbers with each of the company created ones. You can also track pricing (and price breaks), BOMs, etc.
Do a Google search for either for more specific information.
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
We are a small company with lots of knowledge and specialty products, most is stored in my head, and fading with age (49 soon). Currently we have over 25,000 SolidWorks files, and market 20 product lines to 4 different industries. Several of these product lines have subcategory products, and need customization. This makes tracking information about the products difficult, time consuming and expensive with current technology.
Mike I spent some time classifying mechanical items several years ago. If you are interested in my methods and knowledge contact me at danzco@thurston.com.
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
We have helped a small company with a parts selection tool and cleaned up their database in the process. We are currently working on developing a BOM intagration tool to inteface with the selection tool. This solution has many phases and might help you as well. I would be happy to share this information and other ideas with you.
Paul Veenstra
Electronic Component Solutions
peveenstra@ecs-ol.com
319-270-3588
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
Yes you can tie them together but making sure you capture the right information accurately, manage it correctly, and can quickly and easily find and update it is the challenge (as is making sure systems don't go out of sync; you don't want engineering to be thinking manufacturing is building rev C of a board when rev B is what's in production...or worse - at a previous company the engineering system of record updated the manufacturing system on a weekly basis; it was awful). A good part of that is business processes, not just depending on software (which has to be designed to support your business processes...).
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Mike Kirschner
Design Chain Associates, LLC
http://www.designchainassociates.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
good luck
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
Quick Books Pro has a BOM function, but it will not tie to any CAD software. We have been slow to use this feature because all the SolidWorks BOM information has to be input manually before it is functional. It does work and is inexpensive compared to MAS products.
Mike and Paul,
I will be contacting each of you soon to further discuss you solutions.
Ed Danzer
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
Article is at http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/index.asp?layout=article&stt=000&articleid=CA312956
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Mike Kirschner
Design Chain Associates, LLC
http://www.designchainassociates.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
I am looking for information pertaining to a program for monitoring of Age related degradation of electronic and instruments. It would also help if someone knew which Nuclear power plant has an existing program in place.
Regards,
Sam Reddy
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
Cheers
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
I too, like others, believe that standard descriptions and in particular orderable parts numbers the true secret no matter what PDM system or method you choose. For this reason we created a product for the cleansing and analyzing of information over many databases. As one user mentioned keeping yet another database is tough. By opening a BOM and then associating to other data sources, one can effectively find all sorts of information. Keeping aliases becomes a key success then of finding other pertinent information. Only after a BOM is *cleansed* for supply chain orderable part numbers does it become effective when linked to other information in or out of the vault.
Ken Auga
http://www.partlogic.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs
Ahmed Khan
Precience, Inc.
www.precience.com
RE: Managing Parts and BOMs