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Your bill of materials (BOM) is your product’s recipe for success, the central point that dictates how your product goes from design to reality. Don’t you want to make sure it’s the best it can be? In Autodesk’s latest webinar our experts explained how to make your BOM the best it can be by leveraging cloud PLM. They covered topics ranging from how to ensure you have one central, up to date BOM in the cloud to automating processes in order to minimize the risk of human error.
Centralizing your bill of materials
The most important step in optimizing your BOM management is creating and maintaining one central BOM. This is often referred to as a “single source of truth” or a similar buzz phrase, but what it really does for you is make sure that everyone who is dependent on your bill of materials to do their jobs is working from the correct, most up to date, version. Making sure you have a single BOM with all the items your team has created, regardless of whether they were made in different CAD systems, makes it easy for project teams to collaborate knowing that all the data they need is in one place.
Using your comparison data
Once you centralize your bill of materials, it becomes easier to compare different BOM versions. This is helpful because it ensures that anyone who is working with an assembly can see when the parts it contains have been changed and can easily investigate the changes. Essentially, leveraging BOM comparisons to visualize and track item and assembly changes can help you minimize discrepancies and non-conformities.
Automating administrative tasks
By now, you already know that using automation can reduce the amount of time you and your team spend on administrative tasks. Native CAD plugins to Autodesk PLM allow your designers to make changes to BOM Items without having to leave their CAD tool, not only saving them the time it takes for them to switch back and forth between different systems, but also reducing the risks of inputting and transcription errors that can happen when they have to manually make changes in more than one place. Automating your processes can also make it easier for you to initiate certain workflows such as change requests and even return processes based on pre-set triggers.
