Best Practices of eBOM and CAD management

Today’s trend in manufacturing is customization of product; this is a big challenge for manufacturing companies. It is very flexible and good to deal the things in mass-production companies, when the target is to produce large number of items with predefined configurations. Today, clients are thinking on how to customize, reuse, and quick complete everything. Companies dealing with ETO type of business are facing similar challenges.

Effective Bill of Materials management system can address this challenge. If company have flexible BOM management system allowing manipulating BOM structures and integrated with ERP environment, few of below points are on the best way of handling BOM along with CAD

1.       Modular BOM management: The plan of modularization is to create a set of modules /sub-assemblies that one can manipulate in order to create a final product
2.       Create your modular bills and create a planning bill for a specific product. This one will allow you to roll out cost and delivery time for a specific product order.
3.       Identify part families or type of items like standard part (fasteners), engineering parts, processes components (Casting, machining to complete FG), consumable items etc. along with the Item fit to various configurations
4.       Making Effective re-usability of items as per customer requirements queries & search
5.       Keep the practice of both hybrid way bottom up and top down approaches depending on the organization business, product structure driven from CAD data vice versa
6.       Keep use Top down bom approach from product structure driven for complex products along with concurrent design work 
7.       Configure and build to generate various quick reports of BOM, As per effectivity date, Vendor list report
8.       Make practice of Revising CAD only
9.       Make proper CAD attributes mapping with part info
10.   Strong and effective Design review Processes to adapt form early phase of designs once preliminary BOM built
11.    Include all reference documents, specifications to BOM parts
12.   Filtering BOMs can be configured as built, as designed and As released

CAD Data management best practices

1.       Recommended not to have same numbering for Part and CAD Doc as both the life-cycles are different
2.       Have controlled versioning of CAD data,
3.       Map and Built Part and Drawing templates
4.       Work with common settings in collaborative environment, like libraries, templates, settings are same for all CAD users
5.       Controlled Release process of  CAD and go with preliminary reviews
6.       Building Bottom up approaches recommended
7.       Have robust design reviews cross functionally
8.       Flexible processes to accommodate changes  with timely notifications in  Design changes
9.       Practice of Concurrent design and Design in context method
10.   Make a secured and shared one product wise repository to save the cad
11.   Build CAD data as per design practices and parametric modeling

Reference:
Few of PLM blogs, and hands on experience