Inside a company that is doing design and/or manufacturing and that is working with suppliers, there are in general, multiple forms for Engineering Bill of Materials (EBOM) depending on certain departments, such as the design department or the procurement department. If the company is not using a PLM software, the Bill of Materials (BOM) for the procurement department needs to be done manually.
I worked in the past for such a company, where the BOM for suppliers (which was different from the BOM on the drawing) was filled up by the designer in an Excel file, printed and put it into a plastic dossier, along with the drawings to which this BOM referred, then he sent the dossier to another person for checking it, who on his turn sent it to the procurement department. To name this dossier, the designer took out the label from inside the dossier margin, wrote the specific name on it and put the label back with very much care to not rip it. The empty plastic dossiers was taken in advance by the designer, maximum 10 at once, with his signature, from the HR department. After it was completed, some of the dossiers were scanned and sent from the procurement department to the suppliers, for manufacturing the components to which the dossiers referred to, and some of these were sent to the internal workshop (for the parts which was manufactured and assembled inside the company) where the inventory for the dossiers was kept into another Excel file. After the parts manufactured by the suppliers arrived inside the company, were sent along with the dossiers to the internal workshop for assembling and measuring.
Many times, the parts that already were inside the workshop, were need it to be modified by different reasons, like some mistakes of manual filling the BOM by the designer, which were passed unnoticed by the checker, or because there were some changes on the customer side.
These modifications were kept inside the company by revising only the drawings. The files for the 3D models were kept in different folders with different names like one with the original name, one with the termination "_old" and another with the termination "_old-old". There were cases when, because of the human error, were made some modifications to old 3D assemblies or to some 3D assemblies mixed with new and old files, case in which, because of the wrong settings inside the design software, some files were opened from the customer server and some from the local folders, instead of opening all the files from the local folders.
After the modifications were done by the designer on the new revised drawing, he had to go to the workshop, find the corresponding plastic dossier inside a ring binder folder, then add the drawing inside of it only after he draw, with a pen, the diagonals on the old drawing revision, for the worker to not use it by mistake. But there were cases where the old drawing was not inside the dossier, could have been at an worker, it was not at any worker in the workshop and the designer had to return to the design office with the new drawing, and come back later to the workshop. Sometimes, when he returned to the workshop, with a little luck, the old drawing appeared in the dossier by magic. There were cases when the old drawing it was inside the ring binder folder, but could not be found because the dossier inside the ring binder folder had a wrong name. If the designer discovered the dossier with the wrong name, he took out the label with much care like before, cut the old name with a pen, wrote the name on the other side of the label and put it back into the dossier margin. Sometimes, the designer found that both parts of the label were wrong named, case in which, he took out the label with much care then ever to not rip it, because if it rip's, the broken part remaining inside the dossier margin is extremely difficult to be take it out, after which, he wrote the correct name on the plastic margin with a permanent marker.
By working year after year in this way, the company was tough making profit because it is placed into an cheap workforce country and the assemblies were exported.
But I am convinced that anyone who reads the above thru story and will watch the below short video will agree the fact that the company was waste allot of time and money with BOM management and that it would have been more cheaper for the company to spent some money in advance for using a PLM platform instead of manage the BOM manualy.
In the video it can be seen also the collaboration between two companies, Magic Engineering and Fly Again, which are connected to each other inside the 3DEXPERIENCE on Cloud platform. In the demonstration presented in the video it was used CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE to show the custom BOM on the drawing, but in the similar way it could have been used CATIA V5 or some other CAD software directly connected to the platform.
