Teamcenter BOM management basics

Teamcenter BOM management basics

        Bill of Material (BOM) is a heart of everything in product development in automotive, aerospace industry. Manufacturers are using BOM to define list of raw materials, parts and sub-assemblies with corresponding quantity. There are different aspects of bill of materials such as EBOM (Engineering Bill of Material), MBOM (Manufacturing Bill of Material), SBOM (Service Bill of Material) and so on.

   1)      EBOM:- The EBOM is organized with regards to how the product is functionally designed, including logical assemblies, product knowledge(including historical) and dependencies which make sense during design phase.

   2)      MBOM:- The MBOM contains all the parts and assemblies required to build a complete and shippable product, reflecting the way a product will be manufactured, refocusing on parts as they exist in the physical world.  It is based on EBOM but have additional information that was not required during design such as packing material, assembly process information, tooling, work instructions, paint information, supplier information. 

    3)      SBOM: - It is single (typical for complete product with all option) BOM with combine EBOM and MBOM. It contains all assemblies which need to be identified in the field for maintenance or service purposes.

          Teamcenter uses a concept of precise/imprecise bill of materials (BoMs) structures. BOM is viewed and configured with Teamcenter module called PSE (product structure editor) or also called as structure manager in Teamcenter 8 onwards.

            There is fundamental difference between the two approaches and one should understand their purpose and how to utilize them effectively. Precise and imprecise structure differs by the type of parent-child relationship (relative occurrence) what is occurrence will be discussed in my next blog.

            Precise BoMs: - precise BoM are fixed/frozen or static structured of specific item revision. Precise BoMs have all functionality of imprecise BoMs, and some revision rules can also be applied for sub-component filtering. Precise assemblies are useful in situation where a user wants to control the configuration carefully, for example, when parent assemblies are released and consequently can no longer be modified, any change can have significant impact on the revisions of related assemblies.

             Imprecise BoMs:- It is dynamic structure of items. An imprecise assembly has links (occurrences) to item of its components. Imprecise structures do not hold product development history and are no use for manufacturing. An imprecise product structure is automatically reconfigured when any user releases a part, creates a new part, or performs any other action that affects the view. Therefore the user need not make a copy of the product structure and manually update it each time. It is used in industries where there is no concept of item revisions. Use imprecise assemblies if a user wants to provide many views of the same structure data.