CAD and BOM data get connected

At Water Pik, engineers can drill down to any drawing that is related to a part number on the BOM. Heres how.

Michael W. Koliha, Contributing Writer -- Design News, June 4, 2006

Water Pik Inc. has been using Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software for over a decade.

The initial purpose of the system was closely tied to engineering's Computer Aided Design (CAD) files. Over the years the breadth of data controlled by our PLM system has expanded to include operations, finance and human resources, as well as marketing and other data types. This article describes one of the more than 40 applications for which our SofTech ProductCenter PLM system is managing data, documents and/or processes. This particular application is using drawing data that relates to engineering's CAD files from the PLM system and associating it to the Bill of Material (BOM) information that is coming from our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Step 1: Identify the Need

It all started with an effort to make BOM information more easily available to the engineering staff, an admirable goal, as well as a business necessity. Although engineering was the driving force behind this project, numerous other areas would be able to benefit from an application that provided easy access to BOM information while tying that data to the PDF version of our engineering drawings, as well as its change data.

The native tools inherent in our ERP system are not easily navigated by the casual user, which is the category into which most of our targeted end users fell. A reporting application without a steep learning curve was needed. This need for a simple intuitive user interface, coupled with the fact that the engineers really wanted more than just the basic BOM from the ERP system, forced us out of the default interfaces for the ERP system. The real clincher was that engineers wanted to be able to access CAD and change data that was related to the parts they were seeing on any BOM. That particular view of the information was not available on the standard ERP reports due to the fact that the ERP system did not have any data that was associated to the CAD data that the engineers wanted to see, let alone the ability to access the CAD files themselves.

To view a graphic look at how Water Pik connects, click here

Step 2: Analyze and Integrate

We were left with a need for a report from our ERP system where it did not have enough information to create the completed report the way it was needed by the end user. The CAD data that was needed for this report existed within our PLM solution. The BOM information existed within the ERP system. The analysis we did within our IT Department determined that our best option was to integrate our ProductCenter PLM and Oracle Manufacturing ERP systems to allow us to build a report that would combine detailed information from both sets of data and deliver it in a single report on our company intranet. The engineering users agreed with the IT analysis that a web-based solution on the intranet would meet their need for ease of use, as well as the presentation of the information.

With a basic concept to work from, IT went into our discovery phase on this project. We needed to determine a couple of things; where within the ERP structure was the data that the engineering staff needed and how could we build the bridge between these two disparate sets of information? The default BOM information was being driven from a canned report within the ERP system that used our manufacturing part numbers. The engineering CAD data was all stored within our ProductCenter PLM system, which used our drawing numbering system. The drawing numbers and the part numbers were often identical, but not always. The difference between the two usually involved the addition of a suffix on the drawing number which turns it into a specific part number.

Step 3: Keep it Simple!

The complexity of our particular BOM structure within the ERP system made modifying a standard ERP report far more efficient than trying to create a new one from within the PLM system. We began modifying our existing BOM report to return XML formatted data that included all of the required data fields from the ERP system. We then merged into this new XML data the PLM ID number, tying the ERP part number to the PLM drawing number and its associated drawings files maintained within ProductCenter.

The online BOM report can now be displayed using the following process (reference the images on the following two pages):

1. Open your web browser to the initial search screen.

2. Input sufficient data to locate your item.

3. You will then be presented with a list of part numbers that match your initial criteria. From this list of part numbers you can retrieve the corresponding BOM information for your desired item.

1. Once we have the final report on the screen in front of the user, the user has the ability to drill down into any engineering drawing that is related to a part number, as well as to access the change history behind each of the parts. This process has worked so well internally that we have made the BOM reporting tool available to our external suppliers on our extranet, adding similar functionality to retrieve "Where Used" data from our ERP system as well.