BOM Transforming: Align Engineering and Manufacturing Bills of Materials

PETER VAN AVONDT: So, hello. And welcome to this Autodesk AU class about BOM Transforming. Actually, it's all about aligning your engineering bill of material with your manufacturing bill of material, and keep them in sync.

My name is Peter Van Avondt. I'm a technical sales specialist here at Autodesk, serving the Benelux market here in [? EMEA. ?] And I've got here my colleague, Sven Dickmans with me. Maybe, Sven, you can introduce yourself.

SVEN DICKMANS: Yes, thank you Peter. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you are. My name is Sven Dickmans. I'm also technical sales specialist based in Germany. I'm part of the same team as Peter, and happy to be here with you.

PETER VAN AVONDT: So as you can see, we've added our contact details here on the slide. So, if you have any questions after this class, don't hesitate to contact us. There will be also a live Q&A session after this class. And if you have any questions, just type them in the Q&A bar. We will be available during the session to answer them directly.

So this class is all about BOM management. If we are talking to customers, they want to produce better products. And actually, better products means also a better BOM management. Customers are reluctant, or are having issues, with their BOM managements today. BOM accuracy is not that high, parts are missing, and so on. And that's why we want to focus on BOM management in this class.

Now, if we talk about BOM management, it all starts with engineering. The engineer starts with designing the product, creating a specific structure, and also managing the engineering bill of material. In many cases, this is managed in a manual way, maybe using Excel, where they add extra components, virtual components, have to restructure the whole bill of material, add components, quantities, and so on. And then, they need to transfer that bit of material to downstream processes. For example to manufacturing. There may be this bill of material need to be retyped in ERP system, completely manual. And that's a quite error prone process.

Now, within the ERP system, this bill of material needs to have a completely different structure. It needs to be produced, that product. So you need to have a different structure, maybe add specific operations, and so on. And as you can see, in the downstream processes other stakeholders also need to benefit from all this data. In many cases, they need to find the right information. For example, once the product is installed you need to also serialize your bill of materials so that all the products that are installed to the customer place have a unique ID, a unique serial number.

To keep track of all these serial number, what I see happening with customers is that they keep track of this within an Excel file. And then maybe after some years this product, your installation, needs to be serviced. The service engineer needs to have access to the same accurate data. He has build information, becomes actually the asset maintain bill of material. And as we can see, this is managed in a lot of diverse systems.

Now as you can see, we've got a lot of challenges over here. It's a really error prone process where information is hand over in a manual way. So, how can we do this better? Well what we are going to do in this class is introduce Autodesk PLM as a solution to streamline the process of putting engineering bill of materials into one single source of truth. And that will then evolve with automated tools to a manufacturing bill of material. And later on in the process, if you need as build information, spare parts information, or whatever, all this information will reside on this single source of truth. This means that the right information, the right bill of material information, will be available to the right stakeholders at the right moment.

Now in this class, we are going to actually focus on one specific use case. And the use case is here, how can we transform our engineering bill of material that has been created by your engineer and maintain in the PDM system like Autodesk Vault? How can we actually transform that in an easy and optimal way to an manufacturing bill of material? You see, the structure of the manufacturing bill of material is completely different. We've shifted components. We maybe added extra component, additional quantities of components are there, but also operations as you can see in the blue boxes. So if we added specific operations to firstly create a sub assembly, for example, sub assemble the plate with a reducer and so on.

Now as you can imagine, nowadays this is a really manual process, maybe using two different Excel files, compare them manually. This is really error prone and not efficient at all. Now what we propose here, is actually to introduce a PLM system as an intermediate between those boats, PDM and ERP. This gives us the ability actually, our Autodesk Vault PLM solution gives us the ability to publish the engineering release data in an automated way, using power PLM towards the PLM system. We will aggregate all this data in the standard Vault Items and BOMs workspace that we deliver with our PLM solution.

Now once this information is aggregated in the central location, in PLM, we can use that actually in other downstream processes to create a manufacturing bill of material. This manufacturing bill of material will resides in the Standard Items and BOMs workspace, as you can see here on screen, and reference, actually, the engineering components that has been made available on the PLM system. Now, once this bill of material is completed, the manufacturing bill of completed-- with extra components, with extra operations, restructured and so on-- we can easily attach that to extra processes, a release process or approval process, as you can see here on screen.

Now we're pushing the manufacturing bill of material through the manufacturing change order. And on approval, this will be then automatically published to the ERP system. In this way, you will see that you've got a completely automated process starting from within PDM, with the engineering bill of material, that has been pushed to your Vault Items and BOMs environment in Autodesk PLM. There we will restructure and complete, actually, the manufacturing bill of material and push that in an automated way to ERP.

Now to further enhance and optimize the process, what we have done is actually created a custom UI, a custom application that gives us the ability to actually manage and create the manufacturing bill of material in a Visual way. We can easily select components in the viewer, drag and drop components around to restructure, split up components in this UI. And you will get a visual feedback in the whole process, as you can see here.

Now in the next step, what we are going to do and that's actually Sven's part of this presentation. He is going to show this solution. How you can easily review the data in PLM transform your EBOM to an MBOM, and track actually any change that has been made on the engineering side. So Sven, up to you.

SVEN DICKMANS: So let's first of all quickly recap what you're going to see right now in the next couple of minutes. As Peter said, first of all, we are going to review the data of Vault that's been published into PLM in an automated manner. So we will review the data that exists in PLM thanks to the integration that we are going to reuse and to transform into a manufacturing bill of material in the step afterwards.

Why are we doing so? We are going to track what you call the item consumption. That means we can easily track what components are already available and used in the manufacturing bill of materials, and what are the components that were used by the engineers which are not part of the manufacturing process yet.

We will also be able to see how we can react on changes to the design. So the challenge of the manufacturing bill of materials management is not only the initial creation of the BOM, but also to keep it in sync with the changes that are still going to be published by the engineers. And we will show you how you can easily review the MBOM to see if there are any changes to the design that you need to react on. Furthermore, you're going also to have a look at the multilevel manufacturing bill of materials. So we can also have a sequence of multiple bill of materials that define different manufacturing processes. And we can see how we can structure these different levels.

And then finally, all of this is managing and product lifecycle management solution. So it's all about reviews and approvals, as well. And we will just show you how this manufacturing bill of materials then can be attached to a change and review process in order to push the data to the ERP system at the end. So with that, let's get started.

So what you see here right now this is the PLM layer of our Vault PLM solution. It's a cloud based environment. So you just need a browser to look into the data. And with this you can access the data at any time, from anywhere you are in the world. And as this is a PLM system, it provides a couple of information and processes. And it's all divided in different work spaces. So we can see the solution that we will see today is just focusing on the transition from EBOM to MBOM. But with a solution, you get even much more like quality management, change management, supplier collaboration. and so on.

But today, we're just going to focus on the EBOM to MBOM transition. So we're going to have a look at the Items and BOMs workspace, where we will manage and hold all the manufacturing bill of materials and the Vault Items and BOMs workspace where we will just see the data that's being published Vault, and that we're going to transform into the MBOM afterwards.

So let's have a look on the data that's being published by the Vault connector into this environment automatically. And what we see here are just certain top assemblies. So I filtered the whole workspace to only the data that's in my interest, because these are just the assemblies that don't have any further parents. And here we can see already, that the Vault connector provides a lot of useful information, like a preview of the components. We can see the number, the title, even the Vault category, and the category icon. We can see where the data resides in the Vault folder structure, the file name, plus a lot of more information.

And we can easily click one of these assemblies and put this to full screen to see all the details that are being published by the connector, automatically. So everything that we're going to see is provided by the connector, and there is no need for the engineer to publish this information into this environment manually. So again, we can see the thumbnail, number, description, title category; All of these things are available in here. We also have some buttons, for example, to go back into Vault if we ever need to, to see how this data looks like in Vault. But basically, there is no need because we have a lot of information, like the life-cycle information. We also have information about its file and revisions as we can see here at bottom.

Now there's some more things that are being published by this Vault connector, which is the attachments, for example. Inside of the attachments I can find all the viewables of my design data. All the viewables that are generated by the processor will be available in here. So this can be PDFs, or also DWFs. And if we have these files attached, we can easily click on them in order to even view the data.

So this also got published by the Vault connector. And you probably are familiar with this viewer which provides us features like sectioning, measurement, exploded views, and so on. And we can even drill down onto these components and grab some information in the panel on the right hand side. And all of this is provided by the Vault connector, and gives us all the details that we need to have in order to build the manufacturing bill of materials, which also includes the engineering bill of materials of course. So we do not only get the same components, but really the assembly structure as it is managed inside of Vault in the items workspace. So here we can see the different assemblies and sub-assemblies of the design that really makes the design of this product.

Now in order to allow for an easy transition of this engineering data now into the MBOM data, we added some information to this workspace. And we even added a specific view that called the MBOM transition. If you switch to this view, we can see more details about this components that are now relevant for the MBOM transition. So here we can see the structure once again. But we have certain columns that we can now make use of in order to do this MBOM transition.

First of all, we have a column here that allows us to open this custom UI, this custom MBOM editor that we're going to use in the next few minutes. And I can open this for any kind of assembly that is provided by the engineers. Now once you add it, and once you created a manufacturing bill of materials, it will also be displayed in here. So I can immediately see if there's an MBOM defined for the current design or not. And if an MBOM exists, I can also see when it got published for the last time. So if I do a change to the design, I can immediately recognize if this will impact an existing MBOM, and if I have to update the MBOM as well. Plus there's some further information on the right that we will investigate in a couple of minutes.

Now, in order to have a look at this MBOM transition, first of all, let's have a look at this table plate assembly. This is just the base table that we need to preassemble before we can finally assemble the whole CNC router machine. So let's have a look at this table plate assembly, first, and build the MBOM for this assembly.

Now before I click on this Open button, please notice that everything that you're going to see now is a custom built UI. So this is really the solution that we're going to show you today, which is not a standard product. It's something that we built as a proof of concept for certain engagements with certain customers. So we are happy to share the solution with you, but please notice that this is not a standard product.

All right. However, once I click on Open, you can see it's pretty smooth because now we have a new UI that opens in a new tab inside of my browser. It reuses my current user session inside of this PLM system. And with this authentication, it will now pull the relevant information to allow me for an easy MBOM transition. And this includes the viewer, first of all.

So here we have this DWF of this table plate assembly at hand. And we can visualize and basically, we have the same view that we also have in this PLM solution and any other Autodesk product these days. Besides that, we also see the engineering BOM. So this is the bill of materials of this table plate as it has been provided by the Vault Connector. And on the right hand side, we can now define the manufacturing bill of materials, which is empty as of now.

So first thing we want to do is, of course, add the components in the right sequence into the manufacturing bill of materials. And there are different ways of how we can do so. The easiest way is just to click on the items in the viewer, because this will automatically filter the EBOM to match the selection in the viewer. So with this, we can easily select a base table. And as we located this in the EBOM, we can see that it doesn't exist yet in the MBOM, so we just click on the Add button in order to add it on the right hand side to the MBOM.

While we do so, you can see that the Add button is gone now, because we added it already. And also, the color changes. There's always a color chip here to the right to indicate me whether if this component exists in my MBOM or not. And this one, of course, now is shown in green. And we can easily go ahead and continue with this, for example, with the screws. We just click on the screws, which are used in the quantity of eight. And we just click on Add in order to add this MBOM as well. And like this, we can just continue and keep adding further components.

So now we added three components. And if it just changed my selection of components in any viewer and deselect everything, we can now see that we selected three components of this EBOM, and added this to the MBOM structure, so these components are already now available in the MBOM. And you're just reusing the components. We're not copying them, we reuse the components that were provided by the engineers.

Now if you want to change the sequence at any time, there is no problem to do so. Just use the arrows here on the right hand side, and you can modify the sequence at any time. If ever you did a mistake, you can always change the sequence.

Now, having a look at the product, if you want to continue the MBOM definition, the next will be now to mount the plate, now that you have the table and the screws inserted. The next is to mount a backlash plate. The problem is that this plate has a block. And this block has to be mounted to the plate first by using the screws. So we have a preceding assembling process that we have to define before we can continue the assembling of the table plate. And this is where the operations, or processes, come into place, that we can also manage in this MBOM.

So at this point in time, I figure out that I need to have a sub manufacturing process that I have to define before I can continue the table plate assembly. And in order to do so, and to manage this, I will just add an operation in here, and say, let's do this backlash plate assembly. And let's give it a code as of now. So we added, now, an operation into this MBOM that is just defining a manufacturing process that needs to be followed before we continue. And now we can add the components that are required for this sub assembling process, also in the same way, into this assembly.

Now I'm not going to do this with the viewer, because I also want to show you a different way of how doing so because you can also select the components directly in the EBOM. So if you that here we have this plate, we can simply click it, and then you see that the viewer will automatically follow my selection and display the giving component on the right hand side. And beside that, we also have some options. Options, for example, that allow me to display details about the selected components on the right hand side. And for the sake of space, let's hide the viewer for a second.

So you can see here also now, if I click on the components I will be able to see the details of my selected component on the right hand side. And once I am sure that I selected right component, I can also add the components from here into the MBOM. So I can also click on Add in here, and easily add the given components into the subprocess of my MBOM. Now you can see that the components are added to this backlash plate assembly operation automatically. And this is because they were assigned to an operation, by a specific operation process that's identified with an identifier, which is 100 right now.

The purpose of this is that you can easily pre-define the assembling process already from engineering perspective. So for example, you can easily define that certain components should be pre-assembled before you assemble the next components. And maybe you want to distinguish between mechanical and electronic components. So you can already pre-define the assembling process by just adding this operation codes to the design, which then later on makes it easy to define the manufacturing process. But it's optional. No need to use it, but we just think that it makes it much easier.

So now we added a couple from components. And you can see a lot of these things now are shown in green, and some are still in red. Now the great thing is that this also can be shown in the viewer, so that we get an impression about how far we got. So if you turn back on the viewer and use this toggle here, we can now even see it as red and green coloring inside of the viewer. So we can still see what is missing in the MBOM definition in order to meet the design.

And now we could go ahead and click on Add, Add, Add. But this is a pretty cumbersome. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use this button here, which is just Add All, which basically does the clicks on all the Add buttons that exist. So it will simply apply all the business rules, on all the components that we have, and add the components.

But wait a second. Before we do so, just let me show you that the colors also can be used to filter. So we can see that we have to color chips here, we have the colors here. But we also have the color bar here on top. And this color bar will always show me how much of my components are really consumed in the MBOM. And this will also be updated as soon as I add components, right?

Now if I want to focus only on the things that are missing-- so if I only want to see the components that I still have to add to my MBOM-- I can simply click on the red bar, for example. And now I only see the components that are still missing. So with that, I can easily validate what is still missing and see why I have to put this components, because this will automatically hide all the components that are shown in green, both in the EBOM and in the MBOM.

And with that we can now go ahead click on Add, or we just use the Add All, in order to add all the components in order to turn everything into green. And as we reset the filter, now we can see the full MBOM here on the right hand side. And everything is green. All the components are placed.

Now there's one thing that is specific that we have to take care of, which is that we have some screws here, that are both used in order to mount the backlash plate, but the screws are also used in order to mount this block here onto the backlash plate itself. So one of the screws is required at an earlier manufacturing process. And right now, we all have this eight screws placed at bottom, at the final assembly process. But this is too late. We must have these screws earlier, because we need to mount this block here.

So what we have to do, actually, right now is that we need to change the structure in a way that we need to split the quantities. Because from design perspective, the quantity eight is correct because we have the screws there eight times. That's correct. But for manufacturing process, it's different because we need the screws earlier. The nuts, sorry, the nuts at early point in time.

So what I have to do right now is if I want to split this package of eight, I just take the package and drag and drop it to where I need it, also. So I take this package of eight, and define that I need them also for this backless plate assembly, and drop it in here. And when I do so, the system will ask me if I want to move the whole package, the whole eight nuts, or if I just want to move a given amount of these nuts into the given assembly. And in this case, I will just move one, because this is the one nuts that we need here.

So we just click on Submit, in this case. And you can see now, we basically split the quantity into seven and eight. It's all still green, because the total quantity still is eight. But now we cut it split it into different instances.

And this is where are we going to reach the complexity of MBOM, because we need to split quantity and actually the structure really is different. Now what is great in this viewer is that you can see that as soon as I select a components, it will automatically highlight all the instances. So I can review where these eight components are in use. But the great thing is that I can even filter on them, and say hide everything else that is not this nut. So if I click on this filtering, you can see that both of the viewer and the MBOM will automatically filter only for instances of these nuts. And I can easily see where they are being used. All right?

So this editor, overall, makes it easy for me to really synchronize the structures. And this is also because we have this balance, here, at bottom where we can see what's the total quantity of this component from the engineering perspective. And what's the total quantity in the manufacturing perspective?

Now sometimes you need to overwrite the quantities. And you can still go ahead and do so. So let's assume we change this quantity seven maybe to eight or nine. And as soon as you do so, you can see that this will then be recognized as a deviation. So it's shown in orange to indicate me that there's something different in regards to quantities, and that we'll be able to recognize that easily. I can validate the balance, once again, at bottom. And now here in this case, we just keep it green.

So that was the filtering. Now, the final thing that you might want to do is maybe we need to add also some [INAUDIBLE] specific components. So maybe we need to add some packaging for the plate before we move it to the next station, or if you put it on storage, we don't know. So let's assume we add some packaging, or painting, or whatever additional materials you have that's only required for the manufacturing process. You can add this here at any time. And just define find the quantity, and press the Enter key. And this will now create a manufacturing specific item in the item structure, which you can easily recognize by its icon. Because the icons always indicate whether if it's a manufacturing specific item, if it's an operation, or if it's an item that's provided by the design.

And with this, we did a couple of things, a couple of changes, so let's finally save the MBOM. So I have to click the Save button in order to save changes back into the PLM system, because everything we did so far was just a temporary modification. It's kind of a markup. So only the editor knew about the changes. And only when I click on Save, all the changes will be applied to the database. So now really, we have the operations and new items, the bill of materials definition, and so on.

So let's have a look what it looks like. So if I open this manufacturing bill of materials from in here, I can easily do so by just opening this MBOM in a new tab. You can see now, this is the table plate assembly. It has this number 67. It's managed in the Items and BOMs workspace. It might have different properties than the Vault items, like sourcing information, compliance information. But of course, this component always knows about its design information that it's based on, and when it got created. Furthermore, of course, we have the manufacturing bill of materials. So here we have the structure that we just created in the editor. And this is really just what we created just before, with the backlash plate assembly, the split of the anti backlash nuts, and the package that we just added to the MBOM.

So you can see that it's pretty straightforward to create this data and to keep the data in sync. Now let's go back to where we started with the EBOM. And let's assume that now, once we define the MBOM and everything is green, the design will be changed. Because maybe there's an update to the design. So the designers might open this design once again, Inventor, and modify it and add components and change something on it. And I just want to show you how we can review these changes in the MBOM editor, and sync it, once again.

And for the sake of time, and I'm not going to do the change inside of Inventor and we're not going to Vault. Instead, I'm just going ahead and edit the BOM directly in here. And I'm just going to do a minor change, and change the quantity of the spacer, for example, from 15 down to 12. OK. So usually you would not do so. Usually you would do these things in Inventor, but for sake of time, we're just doing this in here.

So now there's a quantity of 12, but formerly we had 15. So if I open the MBOM editor again, now, for this assembly, let's see what's happening. So if I opened the bottom I need to, now, you can see it's still pretty much the same. However, now we have some orange boxes, as well, because there is some mismatch in the quantities of this component. And once again, I can make use of the filtering capabilities to easily see all the mismatches that we have in the structure. So if I click in here, I will only see the components where we have a mismatch in quantities, for example. And if there would be new components, of course I would have the red bar as well.

Now in this case, it's pretty easy because we have this spacer here, which is now used in a quantity of 12. Here we have 15. So it's a one to one match of instances. And in this case, I can just click on this Update button in order to update the quantities on the right hand side. No need to copy paste the quantity. I just click one button, and this will then automatically update the MBOM. The only thing I have to do in addition is to click the Save button, In order to update the MBOM actually.

All right. So we did the change. We kept it now in sync with the EBOM. So let's close this tab. Let's close this tap. Let's close the old editor and go back to the MBOM structure. So this is the one before our changes, still showing the quantity of 15. But if I refresh this MBOM once again, after our recent modification of the quantity, you can see really that the spacer now is used in quantity of 12. So it's not only easy to build the MBOM initially, it's also easy to keep these structures in sync.

Now one final thing that I would like to show you is how we can now manage a multiple level structure of the manufacturing bill of materials. And they will just refresh our initial CNC machine's EBOM, because now we can see that the table plate assembly that we just used before, now also has this reference in its EBOM view, to the MBOM. So we can see that really there is an MBOM for this component.

And this is key, once we have a look at the assembling process of the CNC router. Because when I define the manufacturing process, now, for the CNC router, you want to take into account that this MBOM exists already, because this defines how to assemble this component. That means if I define the manufacturing process of the parent assembly, I do not want to have to redefine this once again for the table plate assembly.

And let's have a look on how this looks like. Actually it's solved in a pretty easy manner. Because if I open the MBOM of my CNC router, that's now using the table plate assembly, you can see here that the table plate assembly now is not shown as a tree. So I do not see the subcomponents of the table plate. And I cannot position the subcomponents again in the MBOM editor, because the system already knows how to assemble this table plate. And I only have to define when I need this table plate in my manufacturing process for the CNC router machine. And then the system will automatically reduce the manufacturing process that has been defined for the table plate assembly.

And the same happened for the base frame, for example. Let's have a look what this looks like. So if I would go ahead and define that first of all, I need to use the base frame, then maybe I'm going to mount a table plate. And maybe then I'm adding some further components. It's just the same way as we used before. So if I add this components and then click on Save, let's see what's happening afterwards.

So we just added the table plate and the base frame to the MBOM of our CNC router. And if I close this editor now, and open this MBOM of the CNC router in the end, in a new tab. Let's go there. And if we have look in the MBOM here, we can see now that this MBOM of the CNC router automatically inserted the MBOM of my table plate assembly. So I just inserted one note, which is table plate, in my MBOM edited definition. However, in the back end, we will automatically connect the related MBOM process for this table plate assembly to the MBOM of the CNC router. So here we now will have the full hierarchy of the manufacturing activities, in order to manufacture the CNC router.

And with that, that's enough in order to show you the capabilities of the editor, I think. All the rest is pretty much repetitive. Instead what I want to show you at the very end is now, how we can finally, review this information, how we can get it approved in order to push it to downstream processes and push it to ERP. And now we can do this easily with the standard PLM features, because PLM gives us the capability, for example, to initiate a change for the process, which is basically a review and approval process for the item data.

Now the great thing here is that-- let's do this as the MCO draft. That's the draft of the MBOM that we want to release. The great thing is that we can have different templates, for example, that define who has to review this change. Do we want to involve further stakeholders? Or do we just want to publish it? So it's a highly flexible solution that we are using in here.

And we can also define whether if this MBOM that we're going to release, is if this is already ready for production, or if this just is a pre-release. So maybe going to inform the purchasing department and quality department already, up front, about something that we plan to release. So we're going to release a preliminary release. Or we can also finally release it to production.

So now we added this change order. This change order now knows that it's about this MBOM that we want to release. And there are a couple of tabs here for the change order, and I don't want to bother you with this. I just want to show you that this actually will now initiate an approval workflow, which will involve all the stakeholders that need to review the data and maybe want to share their comments and maybe recheck if there are some changes required. So this workflow really now keeps the data in sync, and all the stakeholders in sync, and will take care of the approval of the manufacturing bill of materials. And finally, once the data has been released, it will also push the data down to ERP.

Now with that, let's conclude the demo, and have a look on some of the technical aspects of it, and see what's behind it. Now most of the things that we saw, so far, is based on standard features that's provided by Vault PLM, with the items workspace, the Vault items workspace. The only thing that, really, we added is this custom UI. But we also added some settings, in order to make this MBOM transition process work. And I just want to explain this in a more details.

So you notice that once you go to the Vault items inside of this Vault PLM solution, we have a lot of Vault information. But also, we have the settings that we saw in the BOM editor, or in the BOM display. And they are really key for this MBOM editing solution. Because this first of all, gives us this editor access, right? We just click on this Open to open editor or this Custom UI. And then we will use the current user session, current user permissions, in order to display the UI. And then furthermore, once you created the MBOM, we will find a link in here, a reference to a related MBOM. So if ever we are going to reuse the design, we will automatically know how to manufacture this component.

We also have this data of the last sync, to know when did we update the MBOM for the last time, which is very helpful if we ever do a change to the design, because we will be able to recognize if we should open the MBOM editor or not. We also saw this mechanism of the operation code, this 100 that was defined for certain components, in order to let them be positioned in certain operations.

And Furthermore we have a toggle that is called "Is An Item." With this option, I can define that if this is an assembly, I don't care about the manufacturing process of the assembly itself. And because maybe this is a pre-assembled component, would that be received from our suppliers pre-assembled already. So why we define the detailed design to let the suppliers know how to manufacture the components, and what to manufacture, we don't care about the manufacturing process itself. And therefore you can just toggle this as an end item. That means we are not going to define the MBOM itself.

And then sometimes you have some components that you create in a design process. But these components are not really physical objects that you're going to really manufacture, in the end. And if this is the case, you also have this option to define that a certain component should be ignored in the EBOM. And if you turn on this toggle, the given component never ever will be displayed in the MBOM editor. So there are good and powerful settings that allow you to manage the transition process.

Now, in regards to the solution that we're using here, let's have a quick look on the products that are enabling this powerful solution to go from EBOM to MBOM. And of course, the most important key component is this Vault, because we use the Vault items data that is published into the PLM platform. So really Vault is the one data management solution that is driving all of these things. But we are talking about the vault PLM solution. That means we also have the PLM solution that is connected to this log environment. The PLM platform that gives us advanced features like this enterprise BOM management, where we do not only have the EBOM, but also the MBOM and as built, as contained, and so on, which also then provides us the change management, quality management, and supplier collaboration capabilities. And really this is the product set that we used in order to develop the solution.

And usually, this is what PLM solution really is a great solution to close the gap to downstream processes, because it can be connected to any kind of ERP system. We have SAP listed in here, but that's just a placeholder for any other ERP system we have here in the world. So if we make use of the change management solution, for example, inside of the PLM layer, we can let the data be published to ERP automatically once the data gets released.

And this is something that you would find typically at a lot of our customer engagements. And what we did specifically for today, with a custom built UI actually, is that we just developed this UI and we used Node.js for this to develop this web component. But actually, you can also use any other development utility that you might prefer. So it can also be c-sharp, .Net, whatever you want to reuse. Because actually everything that we're doing is based on the open rest APIs of our Vault PLM solution.

And you can make use of this APIs in any platform. And we are using these APIs just to pull information, and then to update information, inside of PLM. We're not storing any data outside of the platform. So we don't have any data repository outside of the PLM solution to store any information. Everything, really, is managed in PLM. We just interact with the APIs in order to pull and push data.

Now, why do we think that this is the best solution, and why this is a great solution? And by the way, we had a pretty interesting project in the past year, where a customer tried to do this EBOM to MBOM transition in different solutions. He tried with Vault, but failed. He tried to do it with ERP only, and failed. He tried to do it with a competitive PLM solution, but also he failed. And only once he saw this proof of concept that you saw today, he got convinced. And now finally he's mentioning really this process specifically with Vault PLM.

And he's doing so for a couple of good reasons. First of all, we have a standard solution with the enterprise BOM management inside of Vault PLM, where we have the different levels of the BOM predefined already. We have the standard Vault connector so it makes it easy for you to connect your Vault [? installed ?] base with the solution. And it's a cloud based solution. So the deployment is fast. You can get started very quickly.