Generative bill of material processing systems

Many manufacturing companies have, over the past several years, been forced to drastically increase their product assortment. Many of them have found that traditional bill of material (BOM) processing systems do not sufficiently support the maintenance of very large amounts of product (structure) data. This maintenance problem is implied by the requirements to identify each product variant explicitly by a part number for which product data including BOM data must be defined explicitly. With the introduction of MRP oriented production control systems a great deal of literature has been devoted to structuring the BOMs to support the master production scheduling function. In particular the concept of modularization BOMs is a well known research issue. In this paper the assumptions underlying the successful modularization of BOMs are made explicit. It will be shown that in practice, seldom can all assumptions be true. Therefore, new concepts for representing BOMs of large numbers of product variants are required as well as the supporting BOM-processing systems. A new kind of BOM-processing systems is introduced, called generative BOM-processing systems. One particular kind of generative BOM-processor is discussed in detail, i.e. the variant BOM-processor. Although the concept underlying the variant BOM-processor does solve some of the problems of maintaining large numbers of final product variants and their BOMs, it has a number of limitations. An analysis of these limitations shows that they are implied by the strong focus on maintaining final product variants.