CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
June 2008
CIMdata News
CIMdata in the News: “The Record of Choice; Feeding engineering information from the BOM to other systems isn't easy, but it can be profitable”
For insight into the automation of bills of material information to the manufacturing floor, Jean Thilmany, Associate Editor for Mechanical Engineering, taps the expertise of CIMdata’s Director of Research Ken Amann:
Amann agrees … that about 90 percent of small to midsize companies rely on manual reentry to move BOM information into pertinent enterprise systems. While larger companies automate these functions through a product lifecycle management application, automation itself doesn't come without issue.
"BOM is the very first area where we saw integration of the PLM side of the house and the ERP side of the house," Amann said.
That integration began in the early 1990s, he added.
"But what's happened over time is we've expanded that level of integration," Amann said of the PLM world. "In the beginning, it was a one-way move from PLM into ERP and then we made that bidirectional, and then we expanded the information so it wasn't just product structure that made it over but also changed information.
"Now we're tying these processes together so information flows as the business wants it to move as opposed to what technology wants," he added.
Learn more at The Record of Choice
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