Order bills of materials in mechanical and plant engineering

Order BOMs are an important control element in mechanical and plant engineering. The growing bill of materials helps to meet the constantly changing requirements and adaptations in projects in this industry.

The daily challenge of mechanical and plant engineering

Machine and plant builders face major challenges when managing their projects. On the one hand, you have to organise long-term projects worth several million euros. On the other hand, you only have the customer requirements at the start of the project. In addition, experience from completed projects may be the most helpful. It is therefore necessary to find a way of project manager be able to create meaningful plans even without standardised templates and parts lists. The integration of all information from the company with the planning is necessary simply because of the required transparency. The complexity of this endeavour is increasing every day for mechanical and plant engineering companies. The use of growing order parts lists can help considerably here.

The growing parts list

At the heart of order management is the handling of a growing Parts list. Design changes, which occur frequently and at any time in the project, are the reason for these dynamic article lists. You start with a rough structure of products. The growing parts list is a relatively rough product structure at the beginning, which represents a master parts list that represents the machine or product to be developed. attachment with the order bill of materials. At this early stage of the project, the main BOMs are usually still a long way off.

Accelerate procurement with order BOMs

The frequently changing planning basis means that, among other things, consistent resource utilisation and the procurement and timely procurement of materials is a tightrope dance. Purchased parts must be procured early enough to be at the assembly site on time. However, if they are delivered too early, they disrupt the process and burden the Liquidity. To this end, the growing parts list offers the option of issuing initial parts separately from other parts in order to speed up the necessary procurement processes.

Documentation with order parts lists

In addition to its role in planning, the bill of materials also makes an important contribution to documentation. At the end of the project, it provides a complete picture of the actual scope of the product. The growing bill of materials serves as incontestable proof of what was actually produced, purchased and installed. Complete documentation is therefore also useful for service or maintenance, which is so important in mechanical and plant engineering. after-sales service.

Manage order BOMs with the right software

The correct handling and integration of growing bills of materials in a ERP Software is not an easy task for most software systems. ERP systems, which were actually created to map series production, struggle with this challenge. The consistency from the concurrent calculation to the documentation is often not in the genes of the software basis. This has already led some machine and plant manufacturers to regard it as sacrosanct that they can simply work with a software zoo of specialised applications and MS Excel and a lot of manual effort is required to transfer data. However, it is worth making the effort to carry out detailed research. Because there are ERP systems that focus precisely on the "specialities" and pursue a highly integrative approach.

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