An early preview of our experiments with advanced multi-level BOM visualization
The capabilities of multi-level BOMs is one of the questions people often inquire about. In the last few week weeks, I’ve been asked many times if openBoM supports multi-level BOMs. If you ask yourself ‘Why do I need a multi-level BOM?’ or ‘How many levels do I need in my BOM?’ navigate to one of my old Beyond PLM blog posts, here.
The following picture provides a typical example of a multiple level engineering BOM. This BOM is driven by assembly and component structure.
Note that other BOMs such as manufacturing, planning, or sourcing can have different structural organizations. I will not talk about them for the moment. I will come to that later in another post. However, it is important to remember that openBoM’s flexible data model is built to support a variety of BOMs in many forms.
On today’s post, I want to provide some information about what openBoM can do now and what we think of future of multi-level BOM support. Since our last product release in June, openBoM supports multi-level BOMs by organizing dependencies between BOMs using Part Numbers as identifications. Simply said, you can assign a Part Number to a BOM and use it in conjunction with the Part Number of an item in another BOM and voila, your BOM is “multi-level”. The following openBoM tutorial video can give you a basic idea of what’s possible today.
In the following video, I want to show you a practical example in openBoM of building a multi-level BOM using a frame assembly, created from an Autodesk Fusion360 model:
I hope it gives you an idea of how multi-level BOMs work in openBoM. However, you might ask, ‘What about circular references?’, well yes, we do care about that too. If you try to create a circular reference openBoM will alert and prevent you from creating one.
Last, but not least, we are working on some cool features that allow you not only to navigate between levels of BOMs, each in a separate browser, but also, to visualize them. The following video presents a glimpse of the future — shhh…. don’t tell anyone. :)
Conclusion. openBoM has fundamental built-in data management capabilities to manage multi-level BOMs. And we are not done by any means, apropo, recall John Gall’s law and his book: we can only create a complex system by building it bottoms-up from a simple one to a more complex one. We understand the complexity of BOM organization and our future data models will allow us to support levels of complexity such as effectivity, options, configurations.
Because openBoM inherently captures the relationships between parts, you are able to create multiple BOM organizations using the same Part Numbers and leverage ‘Where used’ and ‘Composed of’ queries everywhere.
If you want to learn more, contact me directly. We’d be happy to give you a sneak peek and get your feedback.
Best,
Oleg @ openbom.com
