BOM Management
If you’ve ever managed an interdisciplinary manufacturing project (one that involves engineers, purchasing, production and contract manufacturing groups) you’ll know what I mean when I say each discipline speaks its own language. When you’re dealing with engineers you’re talking CAD and design; when you’re working with purchasing and production you’re talking ERP and SCM. And [...]
We’re offering something new at Arena—single-user, lightweight BOM management. Let me explain. We’ve come a long way since our early days as BOM.com, and today Arena is used by thousands of manufacturers around the world. And while we’ve solved the problem of capturing, communicating and controlling product data for small to midsize organizations with our [...]
Imagine where you want your business to be in five years. Can you get to that place if you’re still managing your BOM revisions and changes in Excel? For most manufacturers, the answer is no. Excel is a shortsighted business tool—not well equipped to manage change and collaboration with internal teams, let alone a global [...]
As product life-cycles continue to shrink, price pressures increase and the supply chain becomes more globally dispersed than ever before, it’s surprising how few manufacturers are prepared to manage the chaos. For example, if you’re still using Excel to manage your product data, you’ve probably noticed that managing change and collaboration with a global supply [...]
Why would I want to take the time to learn and implement a new tool when I have one that is doing the job . . . kind of . . . at least for now? Sound like you? We all have cut corners at some point in our lives— from using a half-broken umbrella [...]
The point of purchasing a PLM or PDM system is to simplify and centralize your BOMs and other product data. But once your BOMs, Items, AMLs and associated content exist in a structured format, you are faced with a new problem—how do you share your data with vendors and internal players who aren’t plugged into [...]
Throughout our many years of working with manufacturers and their supply chains, we have developed quite the collection of BOM management resources. Today I wanted to do a bit of a round-up, and share some of our most popular “BOM” blog posts and downloads from the Arena website. Enjoy! And if you have any additional [...]
When you outsource assembly, the product of your engineering department isn’t really hardware—it’s raw information. This raw information (BOMs, drawings, specifications, purchasing and sourcing information) is of critical importance to your suppliers, yet many OEMs lack visibility into how ambiguous their data can be when it’s received on the other end. The idea of throwing [...]
On any given team, a wide variety of people—from engineers to customer-facing staff—must work together to move business forward. But when you’re dealing with tight production schedules and aggressive quarterly goals, keeping everyone on the same page can be a challenge. (And when you throw in external partners and remote employees, it gets even more [...]
As closely as manufacturing and engineering work together, sometimes it feels like they are worlds apart. Engineers are told to design something, manufacturers are told to make something. Engineering opens the design funnel, manufacturing closes it. Engineers wrestle multiple theoretical possibilities into a realistic design, manufacturers make that design a physical reality. When you really [...]
