Assembly Planner has had the eBOM/mBOM control since the very beginning, however, it wasn’t until recently that customers could control the types of BOM differences they wanted to highlight. The idea is basically that depending on the incoming and outgoing BOMs Assembly Planner is dealing with, the importance of differences in the eBOM/mBOM compare can be weighted uniquely. For example, some companies do NOT care about item revision differences within the mBOM, and would rather not even see those differences. With this in mind, we added a control for making choices on color, visibility and priority sequence.
This new control is in the preferences section that is generally only used by Administrators. The tab “BOM Comparison Flags” has all options currently open to users. Administrators can control how eBOM is copied to mBOM via different functions within the system. For example, ‘Use Plant From Date as Default BOM Effective From’ will cause the system to use the plant ‘from date’ when copying, rather than today’s date or the date from the eBOM.
In addition, the BOM Comparison Flags grid shows the relative priority, On/Off visibility status, and color of each possibility. As a note, what is available in this grid may vary from customer to customer. In general, the concept is that the user should move the priority of the type of flag up and down to be sure the most important are on top and the least on bottom. That ensures that the user will see the most important types and they wont be hidden or overwritten by something less important. Whether a flag is applicable to eBOM or mBOM is shown but is read only and purely informational. The color selection is simply there for personal preference. If the On/Off box is NOT checked, the change will never be shown.
This example shows clearly the multiple changes required in a visual way, allowing a user to make the changes without much other information required.
After the changes, the flags should all be gone as the BOMs match.
With all of these set to the businesses liking, the ability to compare differences between eBOM and mBOM and make any required changes should become simpler, faster, and less error prone.
