Digital Thread: Aligning the 8.5 Enterprise Bills of Materials

Building Blocks of the Manufacturing Enterprise Broadly speaking, the lifeblood of manufacturing companies is the Bill of Materials (BoM). More accurately, the lifeblood of manufacturing ARE the BoMs. As a matter of fact, there are multi...

ALM + PLM = IIoT

Need for data interpretation and traceability The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in manufacturing. It incorporates machine learning and big data technology, harnessing ‘real-time’...

Replace Where Used: PLM’s Achilles Heel?

Product development requires an eco-system of inter-dependent capabilities and complementary functions to bring teams together around a product creation and industrialisation platform. The so-called platform contribute to converting new ...

BOM Convergence: 4 Integration Patterns

Multiple Enterprise BOMs Bills of Materials (BOMs) can be referred as the lifeblood of manufacturing companies. Whether or not the ‘single enterprise BOM‘ vision will ever be achievable is still open for debate from different perspective...

Single Enterprise BOM: Utopia vs Dystopia

Image credit: http://laurenware.weebly.com/utopia-vs-dystopia.html Bills of Materials, aka BOMs, are multilevel metadata structures that represent a hierarchical arrangement of components, materials, and other information required to dev...

Value is in the Eye of the Beholder

Image credit: Raconteur, CIMdata, etc. What may provide value to one specific end user, stakeholder group or function may not provide the same value to another. One universal ‘one-size-fits-all‘ solution does not exist or may not be perc...

Leveraging Knowledge-Based Configuration for Effective Kit Validation

Image credit: http://thelegocarblog.com/ Effectively product configuration is essential to achieve mass-customisation and equally to satisfy ever more demanding customer requirements. Mass-customisation aims at satisfying the specific n...

Smart and Non-Significant Part Numbers: Why We Need Both to Coexist

Part numbers and bills of material Bills of Material (BoMs) are the lifeblood of product creation – from a wider perspective, BoMs mature as the product evolves: from concept to development, prototyping, start of production, launch, serv...

‘PLM-as-a-Platform’ and Platform-to-Platform Integration to Enable Competitive Advantage

Rapid changes in technologies and IT solutions provide opportunities for increased adaptability and flexibility in terms of enabling or sustaining competitive advantage. Manufacturers, OEMs and Tier 1-2 suppliers spend millions of dollar...

The Periodic Table of PLM

Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) is an operating model and a platform covering across many business needs, dimensions, functional, integration, technical and non-technical layers. These ‘elements‘ represent the foundations of product ...