Items and BOMs bridging the gap between design and rest of the organisation

A large part of the customers at Symetri Europe are operating in the Manufacturing sector. In these companies, typically engineering, design and drawing office managers are concerned with producing drawings that the rest of the organisation use to make, order and assemble things.

They create designs for products and machinery that form a core part of the business and thus are key to profit generation for the companies. It's also typical that these companies' PLM journey starts with a directive or task to integrate the Engineering or Design department with the rest of the organisation.

PLM can be a big unknown at the start. Breaking it down to the tasks you need to complete makes it more concreate and understandable. Think of PLM as tools to complete steps in a design's journey from concept to decommissioning.

Items, the language of business

The first concept to understand on the journey to enlightenment is Items.

The property information the drawings and models hold is just as important or in a lot of cases even more important than the image of the design. Much of the information about a design can be written; what material, how heavy, what color, manufacture or buy in - is information that can be written down and connected to models and drawings.

So, what is the next step?

Adding this information to the design or connecting the design information as text or metadata. Metadata is what the rest of your business or organization understands in the form of items. Through items and being able to access items the rest of the company can understand what the design department is doing.

Now, one item at a time is time-consuming so rolling them up together in a Bill of Materials (BOM) everything that is needed to make a design is the next step. More than just the CAD model because we are describing information as text rather than pictures we can add all the things needed in a design but not drawn.

Grease, Paint, processes

With the BOM generated and more importantly, manipulated you can send the information out into the organization for others to understand and use to help them complete their tasks like purchasing, assembly, and scheduling. The item information can even be sent to the Mythical ERP system for even more visibility and task completion within the organization.

Contact us and we can help you understand the role of the Items & BOM tools we have in Sovelia and how they can help you free your data.

Learn more about Sovelia Core PLM system