Intelligent BOM Management

Successful bill of materials (BOM) management is at the fundamental heart of every innovative product company’s collaboration efforts, it’s the foundation and central focus of Arena’s ever-expanding product offering. Arena’s core capabilities support your company’s essential need for having centralized materials available in the cloud to enable visibility, collaboration, and synchronization.

In Arena’s new whitepaper Intelligent BOM Management for Today’s Product Innovators, we write about the past, present and future of intelligent BOM management. This is a non-intimidating way to get all the information you ever wanted about BOM management in one single resource.

Over the past few decades, we have seen BOM management evolve from manual or unintelligent records to more structured and intelligent ones. As more technological advances were introduced to software applications and relational databases, the ability to manage complex BOMs improved to yield these key benefits:

• Faster product release cycles with easier creation and changes (e.g., the ability to import from other systems, and to make bulk changes across all where-used assemblies, improved redlining tools)
• Greater accuracy with structured assembly relationships
• Better visibility with reporting for single, multi-level, where-used, and consolidated (flattened) BOMs
• Improved search to find components, subassemblies, and top assemblies

While each advancement introduced more effective ways to create, change, and release BOMs, most failed to deliver benefits to the entire product team from early design through production.

The whitepaper defines why innovative product companies need a modern product development platform to succeed that has its roots and heritage in BOM based PLM.

We look at the difference between CAD centric and product-centric product lifecycle management (PLM), how and why they were developed along with the benefits and pitfalls.

In this whitepaper, we compare and contrast several BOM management solutions. You’ll see why spreadsheets for BOM management can’t support the way supply chains interact in today’s global market. And we give you a list of nine questions to easily assess if your existing BOM management system covers key requirements that should be met for a more intelligent BOM management system. If you’re missing one of these essential nine requirements, your BOM processes could be failing you.

As you consider your BOM management needs, remember Arena has been helping companies design, produce, and deliver innovative products in the cloud since 2000. We have elevated PLM into a comprehensive product development platform, conjoining PLM, supply chain collaboration, ALM and QMS.  This methodology has helped complex product companies accelerate new product development (NPD) and new product introduction (NPI) to deliver high-quality products to market faster. Don’t settle for partial or disconnected BOM solutions when you can use a single solution that connects your products, people, and processes. Make yourself a little smarter today and download this BOM whitepaper and read about the top 5 BOM management mistakes that could be costing your business.