If you needed to take a guess… just a guess.. what is the most common ‘enterprise’ application that is used for managing BOMs in SMB companies?
I am wondering whether this was the first thing you have thought about (I know, you can guess it from this post title 
)…
The most common ‘enterprise’ application that is used for managing BOMs in SMB companies is Excel
Is it the right way? why not, some of you will say… Excel is a great tool (agreed by the way…) it is easy to use, it is flexible, but is it controlled?
Let’s look at some critical data management aspects concerning BOM management:
- Look at the following picture, How to Identify the “Right” BOM? Can you help me…
- I need to change the screw, where is it used…
- What about increasing data reuse? or standardization of components? or security?
- And then… as always… what happened when I have a change…
So yes, using PLM to manage your BOMs will be less flexible as using excel and the reason for that will be that a PLM system will take care of your data consistency and your configuration control.
Because of the fact that BOM management is a major challenge in a lot of SMB companies and is very time consuming (time which most of those companies does not have…), we gave special attention to those challenges within our SNE solution (ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express). I think the 3 most important benefits will be:
- Product/BOM Maturity management (with the configurable, embedded business logic to model your company business maturity process and conditions)
- BOM structures synchronization. to enable concurrent and controlled BOM editing (with the configurable, embedded business logic to model your company roles of moving from Design to E-BOM, from E-BOM to M-BOM, Reuse BOMs…)
- Easy to use BOM editing and compare
and in the end… do not forget… COLLABORATION !!!
