Hello all,
We are currently investigating how to handle the upgrade of one physical product into its successor, and how to manage this in BOMs.
Use case:
As an ETO organization we have the situation where a product is in stock, that can be upgraded to another product through modifications.
To define these modifications we are thinking about an “Alternate eBOM – Alternate mBOM” principle. The alternate eBOM for the required product would be defined based on the product in stock and the modifications required to upgrade. Based on this alternate eBOM an alternate mBOM should be created.
The upgrade design is created by design engineers, after which manufacturing engineers create an mBOM definition.
We see some possibilities in the alternate BOM functionality, but some limitations as well, like:
- How do we capture the product in stock in the alternate design? We do have as-Planned and as-Built definitions of the product.
- Our “upgrade design” is done by design engineers, so we would like to create the alternate eBOM in PDMLink instead of MPMLink. This does not seem possible.
- Using alternate BOMs we see that the BOM filters are not flexible enough, if the top level is an alternate BOM, lower level parts are automatically alternate BOMs (if existing).
Are others facing similar scenario’s, and how do you handle this topic?
Very interested in other perspectives on this topic.
Kind Regards
Rens
