Product Before and After Manufacturing - One Windchill Number or Two?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 20, 2025
4 replies
716 views

Version: Windchill 13.0

Use Case: Represent a product in both the design state and manufactured state.

Description:

Does it make sense to refer to a product prior to manufacturing by the same part number it will have after manufacturing? Should the end result of the manufacturing process be a new number (in Windchill)? If the manufacturing is performed by an outside 3rd party, does that change your answer?

Use a weldment as an example and assume the welding is outsourced. If the weldment is used in an upper-level assembly, should it appear as designed with all of the individual plates, or should it appear as a single inseparable (merged) object? When a bill of materials is generated for the upper-level assembly, it seems like it should list a single part number for the purchased weldment, not all of the separate plates required to build the weldment. Based on that logic, should the number representing the unfinished weldment be different from the number representing the finished weldment?

Depending on the scenario used, I can argue either way. I'm curious what everyone else thinks. Thanks!

HelesicPetr

22-Sapphire II

Hi @TomU

Everything depends on the customer process and planning. What system allows you to do and so on.

For example it does not matter for designer if the welded plate is build in house or is outsourced

so in the design model there is no needs to separate finished and semi finished parts.

In other hand if you forward BOM to a stock flor to order the part someone needs to know what to order and how to forward technical documentation and here is it interesting.

You have a design number but system allows you to order just the parts that has a buy number >D

In my opinion you should think how the information is propagated between systems and find really efficient way how to manage this information.

One customer use a flag, outsourced for part that can be manufactured by them self or outside the company. Based on the flag they can generate a BOM for buyer, or for manufacturing in the house.

PetrH

avillanueva

23-Emerald I

Seeing the same stuff here over the past 20 years. We might design something that has multiple mfg steps. Ops sometimes likes to build in stopping points to put unfinished material away which cause suffix part numbers to be generated. Not a practice I like but I keep that junk on the ERP side. If there is a known and well defined build process, we might build that into our BOMs with a stair step approach where one step feeds into the next. In your weldment case, I see no harm in showing a complete BOM of components if it make sense to identify them uniquely. If you want to refer to individual components of that weldment and have models for them, I often opt to normalize things. Treat all things the same. Weldment vs normal assembly, who cares. They can choose to ignore the BOM in operations and buy complete. You have flexibility there.

T

TomU

Author

23-Emerald IV

@avillanueva wrote:

Treat all things the same. Weldment vs normal assembly, who cares. They can choose to ignore the BOM in operations and buy complete.

At my last job we actually got burned a couple of times taking this approach. Purchasing didn't know that a fairly large sub-assembly was designed internally but (always) built by outside suppliers. Since the parts from the sub-assembly were included on the BOM, purchasing inadvertently ordered all of them separately (at great cost) and they could not be used since they had to be machined together as a set (by the outside supplier). In that case, the design contained everything (in CAD), but there really needed to be two separate BOMs - one just for the sub-assembly and another for the top-level design that did not include the components from the sub-assembly. If the number for the sub-assembly doesn't change, then anytime it's used, all the children will automatically come along.

I imagine most ERP systems have a 'state' attribute or something similar to communicate where a particular object is in the build process. I'm not sure if 'view versions' could be used for this or not. Can a downstream view version of an object be added back into an upstream structure?

B

BenLoosli

23-Emerald III

Where I used to work, we had a lot of weldments that were then machined.

The weldment assembly and drawing had the complete BOM to weld it up and was 1 final part number.

The weldment assembly then went into a machining assembly with a new part number.

This allowed us to source the weldment from 1 supplier and then machine the assembly in-house. If we wanted to purchase the machined assembly from an outside vendor, they would get all of the drawings from the machined part on down to the detail pieces.