Compiled with input from QR_ PDM professionals Daniel Garratt, Evgenios Efthymiou, Dave Slawson, Andrew Houghton, and William Smith. This is the first in a three-article series for "QR_ essentials."
Declaring something "good" is almost entirely subjective. In life, there are generally accepted criteria for what counts as good and what doesn't — a chocolate teapot, say, or a window made of bricks. But in the context of automotive product data management, it's critical to discover and understand what automotive OEMs can, or should, consider good.
Is it something fast? Something reliable? Something user-friendly? All of the above? Most likely the latter — but what's the likelihood of achieving each of those in one system? And where that isn't possible, which becomes most important? Those are just some of the key questions that have to be asked to establish what makes a good BoM — and answered to understand what automotive OEMs are actually looking for.
In an industry where the products are so complex and where each engineer-hour potentially equals thousands of dollars, a good BoM system won't be the same for every OEM. A start-up manufacturer producing one or two vehicle lines out of one site is much less likely to put a BoM system through the same demands and strains as a well-established multinational manufacturer producing millions of vehicles every year.
In those larger OEMs, hundreds of users may be operating in a BoM system at any one time, anywhere in the world, working in different currencies, weight units, and languages. If the system can't effectively and efficiently manage that demand, the whole product development cycle is jeopardised. Understanding the needs of the users largely dictates what should be considered "good." Where those needs diverge between manufacturers, the same BoM system may not be good for each of them.
What should a good BoM system contain?
QR_ has been working with an array of clients all over the world to establish what various-sized OEMs consider the most important attributes in their BoM systems.
Consistently, we find that companies — from start-ups to some of the biggest names — ultimately want one master BoM system that can handle all their product data from creation to production.
Although it may seem obvious that a BoM system should be able to manage a product through its entire development cycle, it's also necessary to identify exactly what that includes, and how it impacts a business. Security and confidentiality are key issues: a BoM system that manages all product data from start to finish must also interact with external suppliers, vendors, and distributors. The system must give relevant access to those stakeholders without compromising the confidentiality of the business.
In addition, the system itself will be used by multiple departments even within the same business — R&D, Engineering, Purchasing, Procurement, IT. The system must equally be able to manage who gets to see what information, and track who makes which changes.
Although a good BoM system should be responsive to its multiple user groups, it also needs to be intuitive and support the delivery of a profitable product. Accordingly, it must be user-friendly — time spent inefficiently is money lost to a business. A good BoM should offer a user experience that encourages the business to engage with it as a system and enables users to fulfil the full potential of their role, both in and outside of the system.
One of the key difficulties here is when a data set is evolving throughout the product lifecycle, from proposal to production and beyond. To satisfy the one-master-BoM aim, the data referred to at each stage of the PLM process must also be referenced the same way throughout every subsequent process. QR_ has witnessed countless hours lost by engineers trying to comprehend what "X" is asking for in one report and "Y" is asking for in another — only to discover that the two are fundamentally the same.
Is there a good BoM system for all automotive OEMs?
While perhaps a utopian premise, the criterion that consistently tops the list for the OEMs we work alongside is a single master BoM, handling the data of a vehicle programme from day one to close-out. BoM systems should ideally be broken down and evaluated against the demands of each business, with tailored performance categories to establish where they're good — and where they're not — for that specific business.
Because this evaluation is so dependent on the needs of each business, it's no surprise that there isn't currently one BoM system favoured across the whole industry. With over two million hours of PDM experience across 128 automotive clients, QR_ is uniquely placed to evaluate and improve the quality of data held within any BoM system — and optimise the human actions and processes around it.
Originally published on Medium: medium.com/@quickrelease_/what-do-automotive-oems-look-for-in-a-good-bill-of-materials-system