Under the Hood

Feature Friday: What's New in Fusion Lifecycle - March 2017

Our latest release has quite a few improvements for the modern interface. Reminder: to see the new interface, the Admin can change the Interface Style in General Settings so a user can choose in their profile which to see.

Let's go through a few of them.

BOM Comparison is now available in the modern interface:

The Where Used tab is now available so you can easily view that parent's items:

Probably one of my favorite new features...

You can now apply custom filters to any column in a workspace view using AND and OR operators!

Other enhancements –

Improvements to the Quick Create workflows, dashboard charts, the ability to run on-demand scripts from the Actions menu. 

What do you think? Give us your feedback in the comments.

- Michelle Stone

Fusion Lifecycle: BOM Import Types Explained

Importing data into Fusion Lifecycle PLM is something everyone should feel comfortable doing. It's the fastest way to make changes and get your bill of materials data Into the system, and the fastest way to remove unwanted data.

But, have you looked at the three types of imports available and thought - well, which one is best?  Which one should I use? 

When I was first introduced, it certainly wasn't self-explanatory…I couldn’t figure it out right away.

Any of the three import types will work - you just need to know how they work.

For a walk through all three import methods, check out my video below.

Tell us which bill of materials import you typically use in the comments!

- Tyler Beck, Fusion Technical Marketing

Managing Bill of Materials - What's the best tool?

What is the best tool for managing bill of materials at your company – Pencil, spreadsheets, Google Docs or PLM?

Companies engaging in product development agree that the bill of materials (BOM) is an absolutely critical document in the product development lifecycle, but these same companies probably don’t agree about the right solution. That’s in part because every company has a different philosophy about BOM management, but also because not every solution works for every company, every kind of product, and every process. It’s important that a company beginning its product development lifecycle be aware of their options and what benefits—or baggage—comes with each.

Let’s take a look at some of the common options - pen and paper, Excel, Google Docs/Sheets, and PLM - to see how they stack up against each other.

BOM Management

Pen & paper: poor. Ensuring that the BOM is up-to-date and that everyone knows exactly what’s happening is difficult at best, and likely to cause failure. Collaboration is impossible, unless stakeholders are in the same room with each other.

Excel: poor. It’s difficult at best to make complex associations with BOM items to other assets, like CAD drawings, and collaboration from the Excel file can cause technical hiccups with version control.

Google: decent. While suffering from many of the same control issues as Excel, a Google Sheet does offer real-time collaboration from disparate stakeholders, and has a degree of revision history capabilities.

PLM: excellent. PLM creates a single repository for the BOM that is synchronized across the enterprise so that any stakeholder can access it and maintain control of various changes, including revision history.  Fusion Lifecycle handles this beautifully with a cloud based BOM tool, complete with change orders, BOM compare, and more.  See the datasheet for a list of capabilities.

Cost

Pen & paper: free. Well, minus the cost of pens and paper.

Excel: free. Excel is purchased via licenses for the whole Microsoft Office suite, which contains software used for many other business functions. This makes it functionally free, but it’s important to recognize that there is a cost. Open-source options are also available, making it actually free, but these might cause compatibility issues.

Google: free. Google’s offering comes packaged as part of its suite of cloud services, and that comes with certain degrees of cost. It can be as low as $5 per user, but more complex organizations will find that they might need more comprehensive plans to accommodate their needs.

PLM: varied. Some PLM systems are installed on an enterprise’s internal servers, requiring infrastructure investment, while others are cloud-based—even these require licenses or a varied subscription cost.  Fusion Lifecycle offers a subscription service web app that doesn’t require any infrastructure or hardware. 

Security

Pen & paper: poor. A pen & paper BOM management system is only as secure as your entire facility or office, at least when it comes to internal risk. Sharing elements of this BOM with contract manufacturers (CM) or third parties leaves a manufacturer open to IP theft due to the lack of hierarchy or subassembly viewing.

Excel: poor. An Excel sheet is only as secure as your intranet—unless you have high-level security people on staff, a determined person could breach the system. Because spreadsheets are easily reproducible, a CM could easily collect information without a company’s knowledge.

Google: decent. Google’s own networks don’t get intruded upon often, as far as the general public knows, likely due to the security talent they’re able to hire. When data is lost via Google services, it’s usually due to a user installing malware or being victim to social engineering. The format still suffers from Excel’s replication vulnerability.

PLM: excellent. The PLM software designers are responsible for security, and have the economies of scale to make it work. Because these BOMs are complex, they can be intelligently shared with CMs, leaving the business in control.  Check out the security document for Fusion’s PLM.

Learning curve

Pen & paper: easy. Unless the BOM management system is needlessly complex, it should be easy to onboard new employees or train-up current ones. Keeping it managed and maintained, however, is another issue.

Excel: moderate. Most people have some familiarity with spreadsheets, meaning they won’t require much training to do simple data entry. More complex equations, however, might require training or searching online, and programming in Visual Basic often requires more dedicated technical employee.

Google: moderate. Much of the same applies with Google Docs, although instead of Visual Basic, Google’s programming uses Javascript—a much more common language these days, potentially reducing the technical overhead.

PLM: moderate. These BOM management tools will be more difficult to handle, due to the wide range of their features, but if a company partners with the right PLM provider, they’ll offer a certain degree of training and technical support.

There are many more facets of the debate between these different faces of BOM management, but these are some of the biggest concerns that stakeholders might worry about as they start to investigate the possibilities. They might want to also consider revision control, ramp-up time, how to deal with compliance issues, and change management. That said, every organization must do the legwork to make the decision that’s right for their business and their product—no one solution is the wrong one, as long as it works.

If you decide that it's time to give PLM a try, check out this video on how Fusion Lifecycle can help you manage your bill of materials.

- Tyler Beck

Tip Tuesday! Getting your Product Data in Fusion Lifecycle

Today’s tip comes from an Autodesk Community post – a user was getting a BOM import error on Unit of Measure Column.  He did some self serving by finding the answer in Help...

I found the solution I was looking for in the Help Guide under 'Export a BOM' > 'Re-importing Exported data'. See below:

"If you plan on re-importing a Unit of Measure (UOM) field in your Item Details tab, select a BOM view that includes the field with UOM values from the Item Details tab instead of the Unit field in the Bill of Materials tab. The Unit field in the Bill of Materials tab shows the Unit Abbreviation value while the Item Details tab shows the full Unit Name. Only the Unit Name can be mapped in an import, and so it is required to make your reimport successful."

I covered this several years ago on the blog, but figured it was worth bringing up again – especially since for folks who are new to Fusion Lifecycle, getting your product information into the system is one of the first things you’ll do. 

Lastly, yes, yes, I have another AU plug – but this time for something different. I came across a track geared towards smaller companies that are trying to scale up manufacturing, find funding, establish business models, as well as stories from companies on how they made it. 

If you fit this bill, check out the “Hardware 2.0: How to scale your Startup” classes.

-- Michelle Stone

Four ways to increase productivity with better BOM management

Bill of materials (BOM) management through product lifecycle management (PLM) systems have a bevy of benefits, such as aiding compliance or reducing the degree of scrap, but there are few benefits with more potential value than increased productivity. When companies are scrambling faster than ever to beat their competition to market, increasing productivity, even fractionally, can be the difference between being first, and being something other than first. BOM management helps increase productivity in a variety of different ways, but four areas are particularly achievable for any organization: collaboration, automation, flexibility, and hierarchy.

 

Collaboration: Any product development lifecycle requires collaboration and communication between various departments and key players, but even simple disagreements can have catastrophic effects down the line. Oftentimes, product design, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain players all have different theories on how to manage the BOM—for example, maintenance BOMs are implemented within the ERP system, while design BOMs are created within the PLM. When the product’s complexity grows, so does the need to micromanage changes to both of the BOMs, or develop better integrations between various software silos, or retroactively make necessary changes—all reducing any potential to increase productivity.

BOM management, with a single, consistent BOM within the PLM, is critical to finding these productivity increases. Important to this process is businesses understanding that the BOM is more than a list of parts needed to build a product—the reality of today’s manufacturing means that BOMs contain information about software, manufacturing, disposal information, maintenance information, and complex electronics. By agreeing to a BOM hierarchy that works for every department that touches it, key players can more easily collaborate because they are working from common ground, and via a common language.

 

Automation: Micromanagement. Panicked phone calls. Confusion. Frustrated emails. These might sound familiar to companies that aren’t managing their BOM from a single point in the enterprise. If BOM management doesn’t happen automatically, small changes, even those emerging from somewhere on the supply chain, can have wide-reaching effects. For example, a vendor experiences a manufacturing delay and doesn’t have stock of a necessary part, and that information isn’t forwarded to the right people within your organization. Without that, they can’t begin to plan in advance, or make key changes to the product to accommodate a different part.

With BOM management, all changes are disseminated to all stakeholders automatically via the PLM system, meaning there’s no more checking in with various stakeholders or ensuring that they have the new information they need to move forward, or have responded as required to a change that affects their portion of the product development lifecycle.

 

Flexibility: Successfully managed BOMs will allow certain degrees of flexibility, which manifest in not only some previously-mentioned areas, such as negotiations between departments, but also in the capacity to respond at-will to events both inside and outside of the organization. For example, good BOM management involves the specification of acceptable part substitutions for any given part of the product. The capacity to designate alternatives means there is built-in contingencies for various market movements that are out of the organization’s control.

Organizations might find the need to rapidly increase production due to consumer demand or, if they operate within a supply chain themselves, demand from their customer. If demand dictates doubling production over the course of a few months, having those alternatives in place from the beginning, and integrated into the BOM, means upmost productivity in meeting new expectations and delivering on time. Organizations without this kind of flexibility will find themselves constantly searching for alternatives, and creating contingencies on the fly, which absorbs time that could be spent elsewhere, and leaves the organization open to additional risk in scrap and quality control.

 

Hierarchy: Modern-day PLM systems allow for companies to use multi-level BOMs—think nesting parts or items in order to organize multiple assemblies, not unlike folders in a computer’s file system—but whether or not to actually use them for increasing productivity depends on the type of organization, and what product development it will engage in. The BOM structure should always reflect the type of work that needs doing.

A mechanical engineer, for example, might prefer to use a multi-level BOM, so that a certain sub-assembly can be utilized in multiple product designs, which reduces the need to re-engineer similar parts. Product development that uses off-the-shelf parts, however, might necessitate a single-level BOM, with no hierarchy, thereby making the BOM a little easier to manage overall. If one deals with a contract manufacturer, it might be advantageous to use a multi-level BOM and share only that sub-assembly’s information to protect intellectual property and minimize the risk.

Some argue that deep hierarchy allows a team to be more flexible in finding alternatives to potential problems, others argue that single-level hierarchy ensures that the BOM never becomes unmanageable in its complexity. Both methods can increase productivity—businesses must figure out which organizational strategies best fit with their engineering disciplines, supply chain makeup, and overall organizational structure.

 

And that is true of all four of these categories of BOM management—the PLM system does not force any one methodology on the product development lifecycle. It simply enables organizations to use them if they so choose. Using PLM to enable a centralized BOM will already increase a company’s productivity, but delving into the nuances of a PLM system’s features, particularly in the beginning of the product development lifecycle, will equate to productivity gains are guaranteed to be game-changing.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

 

What should be included on the Bill of Materials?

When one opens up a box of IKEA furniture—say, a coffee table—they’ll quickly find a small booklet containing two key pieces of information: a list of all the parts contained inside the box, and instructions on how to assemble the table. Without this document, would-be assemblers would be lost without much of an idea of what goes where, and how, and why. In the product development lifecycle, the bill of materials (BOM) serves much the same function: a document that teaches manufacturing operations how to actually create the product the design team has dreamed up. In starting product development, companies need to not only create a BOM, but also be aware of some crucial questions.

What should we include in the BOM? Here’s one place the BOM differs from IKEA instructions: the BOM needs to contain a whole lot more than quantities and little pictures of various parts. It’s important to include quantities, part numbers (to an intelligent or non-intelligent numbering scheme), descriptions, part names, the BOM level, how it will be procured, additional relevant notes, and more. Different products require BOMs with different items—for example, electronics will require references to how circuit boards fit on the bigger product, plus firmware information. As long as it isn’t difficult to manage, it’s likely better to include more information in the BOM than less—manufacturing won’t suffer if they know too much, only too little.

How much detail is needed in the BOM? This is less about the complexity of detail, but rather what kinds of details should be included in the BOM. This depends on who will be touching the BOM or trying to read it later on. IKEA spends a lot of time and money ensuring their instructions are foolproof for almost any would-be assembler, and while companies don’t need to make their BOM comprehensible for anyone, they should ensure it offers all the context necessary to build the product, particularly if the design and manufacturing teams don’t actually ever sit down in the same room to collaborate on the handoff. These details often include CAD work, or documentation about how assembly should happen.

Are consumables part of the BOM? Companies need to determine whether or not they want to include something like glue or Loctite, which is to be used to assemble the product, in the BOM. Some think this would fill up the BOM with excess material that manufacturing should be able to figure out nonetheless, but that mindset creates potential risk. If something isn’t in the BOM, manufacturing just might not include it, which would lead to a faulty product. That said, if design and manufacturing collaborate regularly, this might be an issue that’s solved elsewhere.

How does the BOM deal with change? The BOM is not something that’s created once and never touched again—it’s subject to enormous change throughout the product development lifecycle. Companies need to come up with established processes for dealing with change, whether that’s a supplier who can’t deliver the requested part, or an engineer who has noticed that a material used breaks compliance with certain key regulations. If the company works with contract manufacturers, this becomes doubly important, because while it’s one thing to catch a problem internally, once a poorly-managed BOM has been received by a third party, the risk for error is high.

What is our BOM management strategy (and software)? This question takes the previous one further, and deals with the core of the product development lifecycle. Will the company use a homegrown solution of paper and data entry specialists? Will they use an Excel sheet on a networked drive? Will they use a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution that offers features like engineering change order management and complex BOM hierarchies? Every company has different needs, but the BOM needs only to be carefully managed, regardless of its complexity.

Will the BOM be flat or hierarchical? Sometimes, companies like to manage the BOM so that parts within a certain assembly are grouped together under their parent, which creates a hierarchical BOM. This can make certain management tasks easier, but adds to the overall complexity, particularly if a company is using Excel for their BOM management strategy. A flat BOM, where everything is given the same priority, might be good for electrical engineers and for simpler management, but it doesn’t allow for complex relationships between products and makes working with contract manufacturers slightly more complex.

Even with detailed instructions, many of us share in the experience of accidentally assembling a bookshelf incorrectly, or finishing assembly and having a few too many extra small parts. It’s not difficult to imagine how complex the process would become without the instructions, which IKEA has spent a great deal of time and money developing. A manufacturer should consider their BOM much the same way—if they can’t answer the above questions as they’re creating the BOM, the plant floor team is going to struggle. And when it’s a matter of producing a whole run of the product, an accident in assembly is going to be much, much more than an inconvenience.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Have a Part Number System Your Bill of Materials Can Be Proud Of

Any manufactured product is made out of different parts, which can number in the single digits, or the hundreds, or the thousands. Because the company needs to manage and track these parts through the entire product development lifecycle, part numbers are created as a standard method for referencing parts. It’s not unlike the number beneath the barcode on that carton of milk, or the SKU you might use to search a product on an online retailer.

A bill of materials (BOM) includes these part numbers, along with other information, such as the name, to give a comprehensive view into the components that make up the final manufactured good. Without part numbers, simple miscommunications about a part’s name could end in disaster. Luckily, a product lifecycle management (PLM) system will not only help you create part numbers, but do so in the method that makes sense to your business.

Why does it matter?

Choosing part numbers is not as easy as choosing something entirely random, or banging on the keyboard—there are two strategies to creating part numbers: non-intelligent, or intelligent. Of course, if you pick the former it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—pick what works best for your company.

Non-intelligent

Sometimes also called non-significant, this method usually means that new items in the BOM are giving an iterative part number, meaning that it’s one higher than the part that came before it. A plastic component might be 0003472, and a screw might be 0003473. In this strategy, there’s no connection between the part and its number—it’s context-less.

There are pros and cons to this system, but many like it because it’s fast, and employees don’t need training or knowledge of the part in order to assign it a number. Anyone with access to the BOM can add parts and generate part numbers, which means the company isn’t waiting around for a certain key player to take control. That said, the lack of context sometimes equates to difficult maintenance, since there’s no way to get full understanding of a part based on its number alone. More metadata will be necessary in order to make that clear. Data entry can always go faulty as well, leading to parts that are mis-numbered, which could go unnoticed for too long in the product development lifecycle.

Intelligent

Also referred to as significant, the intelligent strategy involves using descriptive details to help provide context for the part. Oftentimes, it includes acronyms or other symbolic language. For example, certain length screw might be given the part number FAS-10-08-PP-0001, where “FAS” stands for “fastener,” 10 equates to the length in millimeters, 08 equates to the thread pitch in millimeters, and the 0001 is an iterative count of equivalent parts.

Ford is famous for its complex part numbering scheme, which includes information about what decade the part is for, which vehicle, which options (sedan vs. hatchback) and the general location of the part in the vehicle (anything 6000-6999 is engine parts, for example). With intelligent strategies, companies can get as complex as they’d like, although, similar to the non-intelligent route, there can be downsides to fanciful systems.

With intelligent systems, training is often necessary to teach new employees how to properly use the scheme—if they don’t do the work correctly, it could lead to an incorrectly-numbered part that causes issues down the road. A specialist or key stakeholder, someone who is uniquely qualified in the part numbering scheme, might be necessary to ensure compliance, which would create inefficiencies if they’re overburdened and can’t make additions quickly. Even if a company navigates these issues, they might find themselves up against issues caused by the strategy’s limitations. In Ford’s case, for example—what happens if they develop more than 1,000 engine parts? The 7000s are reserved for transmission and clutch parts. An alternative needs to be developed, sometimes after mistakes have already been made.

That said, intelligent systems make searching a breeze compared to sequential or non-intelligent system—imagine how easy it would be to find all the fasteners in the BOM by simply searching for “FAS.” At-a-glance contextual clues can go a long way in helping engineers catch errors that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. A plant floor employee might be able to quickly see that a particular fastener is too short, and was mislabeled, whereas if all they had was a six-digit number, they wouldn’t have the same visibility. Intelligent systems also enable better change management—many companies attach an “A” to the end of the part number for an initial version, B for the first revision, and so on.

The good news is that today’s PLM systems allow for companies to follow either non-intelligent or intelligent strategies in whatever method works best for them. Before the product development lifecycle moves into design, companies should prepare themselves by getting familiar with their PLM tools’ part naming capacities and how they make either option easier. The BOM is a complex document, but the right strategies can make it not only navigable, but productive to the product’s entire lifecycle.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Managing Bill of Materials with PLM

Imagine using a cool, intelligent tool for your designs and engineering - it's called CAD.  Now imagine using a napkin and pencil for your bill of materials. It may seem a bit extreme, but that's how lots of companies do it today. Not much technology goes into keeping the product recipe intelligent.  I digress. 

If your company: 1) has bill of materials 2) change orders, and 3) makes something, then you should check out the following video.  It's a bit silly, but the message is an important one. What is the bill of materials and why does it matter?  What does Fusion Lifecycle do and how can it help your company?

 

 

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Ten key things to consider when picking a Bill of Materials Tool

If you’re committed to investing in a bill of materials (BOM) management tool, that’s a big step in the right direction to creating a product development lifecycle that has structured processes, is repeatable, and reduces the risk of error. Unfortunately, finding the right solution for your business isn’t necessarily easy, so I’ve compiled ten key features, components, and details that will make a big difference when you’re finally ready to better manage your bill of materials.

Cost: Any business needs to consider the investment necessary to introduce new software into the product development lifecycle, and traditional enterprise software often scares away would-be buyers for its assumed high cost. In some offerings, this might be true, but one needs to factor in the ROI potential for higher quality and reduced scrap. Other offerings are offered in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, and operate under a subscription model—with increased features or user licenses comes increased cost. In theory, this helps businesses scale their needs depending on their changing business.

It’s more than Excel: While spreadsheets might seem like the easiest solution due to the ubiquity of software that can open and make changes within them, Excel doesn’t offer many of the major features that make BOM management tools shine. Yes, the cost for Excel user licenses might be low, but using Excel will end up costing you money in rework, lost time and errors.

Real-time collaboration: Moving into the nuts and bolts of BOM management, any system that’s to be seriously considered must offer a single repository for the BOM, one that is updated automatically with every change and synchronized across all key players. Every engineering change request (ECR) and engineering change order (ECO) should be immediately recognized by the underlying BOM and adjusted for accordingly. The system’s tools should encourage good processes and revision control, which means that everyone is looking at the same information. Two Words: Repeatable Process!

Revision control: While the most up-to-date version of the BOM is necessary to ensure healthy collaboration, it’s also important that engineers be able to understand a product’s entire lifecycle, including the ideas or parts that were scrapped. These contextual clues can help engineers make better choices about further revisions, and reduce the risk that they re-introduce a flaw that had already been ironed out.

Technical roll-out: As with cost, some BOM management tools are offered on premise requiring a full infrastructure and software/hardware management. And,  others are run as a SaaS from the cloud—every organization should consider the pros and cons of each, and how they would fit within their particular needs. If an organization is considering a solution that needs to be run internally, they should also consider what kind of technical roll-out they’ll need in order to make the service run. Will they need more servers to handle the additional load, and are those servers secure? Will they need to hire technical support staff in order to handle service requests and questions from engineers? What happens if a server suffers a critical failure? Are there backups and contingencies in place? The SaaS model involves outsourcing many of those questions to another organization—this can reduce internal overhead and lessen the burden on staff, but many worry about security and uptime, which are constant battles for even the most established cloud services.

Security: As mentioned earlier, keeping data secure from prying eyes is of utmost importance, but what about the companies you do let peek at your BOM, such as contract manufacturers or members of your supply chain? A good BOM management tool will offer contextual views of the BOM, which can then be shared with these partners, giving them visibility of only what they need to get the work done. In a time where more companies are concerned about trade secrets, it can’t hurt to be sure your supply chain is locked down.

Integration with CAD: Because CAD software is used in hardware development of all types, it’s important that stakeholders be able to view and manipulate CAD designs as needed. An engineer shouldn’t have to run over to the design team in order to view a specific part to see how it fits within the larger picture—visualization allows them to better understand the product and gives them the opportunity to collaborate in real-time with the design team on any potential issues early on.

Attribute visibility: Look for BOM management tools that can automatically recalculate the totals for cost or weight values—these will enable key players to notice at-a-glance when a change will have a dramatic effect. Without that visibility, a new sub-assembly might surprisingly add too much weight to a piece of otherwise lightweight technology, forcing the manufacturer back to re-work in order to determine a solution.

Mobile (global) access: More and more companies need to collaborate between offices in different locations, or different countries, or with stakeholders who require the ability to stay connected while being mobile. The chosen solution should allow access to the BOM from any location, at any time, from a variety of devices—this will ensure that there are no roadblocks in the way of innovation and collaboration.

Can it unite the teams: Even if access is enabled for multinational firms, it’s important that the chosen tool actually be strong enough to unite each group under a single umbrella. A single organization might have one process in Excel, another in paper, another homegrown solution halfway around the world, and more—it’s important to take the time while choosing a BOM tool to determine that it can handle all of these disparate needs.

While by no means an exhaustive list of the key considerations in choosing a BOM management tool, staying aware of these ten points will help narrow down the potential partners and ensure that employees are quickly on boarded, so that they can start being more productive and collaborative than ever before.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Tip Tuesday! Pinning Down Details about BoM Features in Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle

Today’s tip comes from a recent Bill of Material webinar run by our own Gavin England. Did you know you can pin a specific item revision to a BoM? Pinning allows you to hard code the use of a particular revision of an item in the context of a particular parent assembly.  Another great ‘Did You Know?’  If you add a superseded revision of an item to the BoM, that item is automatically pinned.

Gavin also pointed out some of the use cases for setting date effectivity and using revision pinning:

•Manufacturing: Understanding of when a new component is to be phased in, allowing better planning

•Sales: Visibility of when a configuration of a product will be available for customers to order

•Service: Visibility of the configuration of a specific product on a customer site, delivered on a certain date

•Quality: Traceability of when a BoM changed and the BoM configuration on a certain date

•Engineering: Ability to immediately revert back to a prior revision of a component in an emergency

You can always learn more about Bill of Materials in our Help!

--Michelle

Photo: Chris Hsia