Lifecycle Starts with a BOM

PETE MARKOVIC: All right, well, hey. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Autodesk University 2017.

I have a co-speaker. I'm not sure where he is this morning. So I feel like I've been stood up at prom. I think he'll show up. We'll see. But I wasn't planning on him doing a whole lot. So I think we'll be fine getting through this.

My name is Pete Markovic. I'm with IMAGINiT Technologies. We are a partner of Autodesk. I don't know if some of you guys have worked with us in the past. But we are a Platinum Reseller and a certified Fusion Lifecycle partner with Autodesk.

Just a couple things about me, I've been with IMAGINiT about six years. I've been working in industry before that as an engineer, CAD manager, product manager, project manager, PLM implementations. I've done other PLM implementations with Teamcenter, Windchill.

And when IMAGINiT got involved with the PLM stuff, I kind of volunteered for this. I said, well, hey, I got some PLM experience, so why don't I move over to that? And I've been specialized over there now for about the last three or four years with IMAGINiT.

It's the first time I've been to AU, first time I spoke at AU. And I inherited this class about two weeks ago. So haven't had a lot of time to prepare. But I do have some good material for you guys. And being that I only had a couple of weeks, it's been a rather interesting experience along with trying to still deliver stuff to our customers.

So before I start, I just had a real quick question. How many of you guys are using Fusion right now, just to get an idea? OK, so maybe about half a dozen.

And then the rest of you guys are looking at Fusion? How many people are looking at Fusion right now or are thinking about Fusion Lifecycle? OK, all right.

So this is slated to be a beginner's class on Fusion Lifecycle. I do have a little bit of advanced subject in there at the end. But for the most part, it's going to be very basic to talk about what we can do, what we can't do with bills of materials.

And I see my partner is showing up.

So this being an instructional demo, I'll be cutting back and forth between the PowerPoint and then showing what it is we're going to be doing.

Hey.

TONY MANDATORI: [INAUDIBLE]

PETE MARKOVIC: [LAUGHING] Did you forget?

TONY MANDATORI: How are you doing? Sorry I'm late, guys.

PETE MARKOVIC: You can put the mic on in case you want to answer any questions.

So with that, let's go ahead and get into this. So our agenda today real quickly, we'll talk about bills of materials real briefly, just kind of ground everybody. What is a bill of material?

We'll get into how do we create bills of materials in Fusion Lifecycle, OK, and then look at the usage. What do we do when we have it? All right, we have a BOM. So what? Now what?

And then the last thing here is advanced print views. So again, this cuts into a little bit of an advanced subject. But it's a very important and generally a deliverable that most customers are going to want to get out of their bills of materials. So I wanted to make sure I included that. It'll be brief. Won't get into a lot of the details but at least show you some of the capabilities there.

So BOM talk, I put that in there. Don't talk about this at the airport, right? That actually did happen to me.

I was with a coworker. We were standing in the security line, talking about a customer, and started talking about bills of materials. And somebody, he starts to say, well, the BOM this, BOM that. And I'm like, I looked around like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Maybe we shouldn't talk about this here. So just a little humor. Just be careful where you talk about it.

So Lifecycle starts with the bill of material. What is a bill of material? We have different terminologies. Every place I've worked with, you know, we call it parts list. We call it BOMs. We have components. We have items. We have parts, raw materials. I took this out of Wikipedia like most of us do. You know, Wikipedia is the source for real good information.

But a bill of material is nothing more than a collection of items. Sometimes those items, and then if you take that bill of material and you put it into another bill of material, it becomes a sub-assembly or sub-parts list, I guess.

So we structure these bills of materials with components and with assemblies of those components to create top level assemblies or larger assemblies.

So let's talk about how we create BOMs. So in Fusion Lifecycle, we have many different methods, OK.

The first one is a manual option, all right. If we didn't have CAD tools, for example-- and I have a couple of customers that are like that. They don't use CAD at all. They actually make food products. And so in their example, their bill of material is ingredients. Their parts lists are, you know, sugar and flour and this and that. That's a bill of material. They do the manual process, OK.

It's used for generally smaller structures, OK. We don't want to have to key in this information as much as we need to. But we also have to build this from the bottom up, all right.

So we create those sub-assemblies. And then we can bring those sub-assemblies into upper assemblies and build our bill of material all the way up to our finished good on that.

Generally, the manual method, we use this for editing our bills of materials. So once we have our bill of material in Fusion, we will use the manual process to add items, take items out, and so forth.

Now, the one thing about doing the manual method-- we talked about this. We'll get to it in just a minute-- is we can only access working versions, OK. And there's a concept in Fusion Lifecycle that's very important to understand, this working version.

But that is a limitation to doing it manually. So if we want to specifically pick a revision to put into a bill of materials, the manual process isn't something that we can do.

Now, when we start, we have import tools built into Fusion Lifecycle. And those import tools all play off of Excel.

We have three different methods. We have a parent child, which is this one here. And then I'll talk about the hierarchy and then level.

Parent child, I won't say it's the most complex method. But it is two steps. We have to do two things. And that's kind of the downside to this, is that we have to create our items first. Then we can use the parent child import method with Excel to make those relationships, to build that bill of material. And I'm going to show all this to you guys, so you'll see it.

The format is a little confusing. OK, we have to have two columns. We have to have a parent column. We have to have a child column. You have to pay very close attention to what's in what.

It's not typically something that we get out of other systems, OK. So if we're exporting out something from ERP or even Vault-- I don't know how many of you guys use Vault here. But we can get bills of materials out of Vault. This isn't something that's just going to spit right out of most systems, OK.

And then the last thing here is Lifecycles and Revisions. Because we're not creating the items, we can't bring in multiple revisions, multiple configurations of those assemblies. So it's got some limitations, OK.

But it is usable. We've used it at times. But I'm just kind of building this up as to, you know, like I said, there's three different methods and give you kind of what the preferred method is.

The next one is what's called hierarchy. This is a common-- what I see commonly-- as an export out of a lot of ERP systems, we'll export this type of bill of material. We at IMAGINiT, we built some Vault tools that can export bills of materials out of your Vault if you're using items or your CAD structure. And we can export out to this type of assembly structure as well.

In this example, we can create the items at the same time. So it's one step versus the two steps that we see with parent child. And again, I'll get to this in just a minute.

The last method here, using the import tools built into Fusion Lifecycle, is called a Level BOM. It's the preferred method, OK. It's the one that we find the most success. So if you're going to be venturing down this path with Fusion Lifecycle, and you're looking to do bulk loading of bills of materials from, like I said, either ERP or some other system, this will be the format that will give you the best success, OK. And that's just based on our experience that we've had using these tools.

It's easy to understand, OK. If you can see there, we have the top levels, level 0, all right. All the 1's, those are the first levels. The 2's that fall directly underneath the 1 is the next level in. And then when we hit a 1 again, that takes us back out to the top level structure and so forth.

OK, so if we had 3's after the 2's, then those 3's belong to the 2's that are right above it. So it does matter the order that we put these in, OK.

We can create the items and the bills of materials' relationships at the same time. So again, it's a one-step process.

And we can import multiple revisions. So if we have different BOMs, like, we have a BOM structure where everything was released today. And then that same BOM structure went to B, and some of those components went to B, we can bring all that in. But it's important to understand to bring it in all at the same time, OK. It has to be done in the same single import.

Now, that's more advanced. And you know, your partners or if you're working with the resellers or with Autodesk, they can help you with that. But one thing to take note if you are doing bulk loading of a large amount of data, OK.

And then another method that we have-- this is not in the import tools, but it does allow us to create a bill of material. And there's a feature within Fusion called cloning, where we can clone an item. So we have an item master in Vault-- I'm sorry, in Fusion. I do a lot of Vault stuff too. So I might actually slip that in now and then.

But don't confuse this with copy design.

So those of you guys that use Vault, you guys all are familiar with what copy design is, right? This is not it, OK. This is not deep level copy design. It is a top level cloning. And it will clone bills of materials. But you're going to end up with the same bill of material as what you started with. It doesn't allow you to substitute parts in and out during that cloning operation. But it's a great place to start, OK.

A lot of our customers use this for maybe branching out one-offs. Maybe they want to try a deviation or something on a finished good or an assembly. They'll use a cloning, OK.

What we lot of times will tie into this is scripting. And again, we're not here to talk about scripting, but I just want you to be aware of this. Cloning and scripting go together, especially when it comes to creating part numbering, OK. So it's important to make sure you look at that, otherwise you're just going to end up with a whole another structure with the same part numbers and so forth.

Attachments, we'll talk about that a little bit later. But we can do attachments in the cloning as well. And this is very fast. So it gets us a copy of a bill of material very quickly.

All right, so I'm going to jump over to Fusion Lifecycle now and demo some of this stuff for you guys.

Now, those of you that are considering Fusion Lifecycle, don't have Fusion Lifecycle, don't really know much about Fusion Lifecycle yet, it is a SaaS software, software as a service. So this is all 100% cloud based. It lives in the cloud, runs on the internet. So everything that I'm showing to you today is live. I do have some screen grabs if we need to. But it seems to be working fine. The wireless in here seems to be OK. Yeah, a little slow.

What's that? OK. So we'll see how it goes.

So let's talk about the manual BOM creation. Now, each of our workspaces-- here I have a workspace just called Items and BOMs. So they reside in the same workspace, because a BOM is nothing more than an item that has items structured underneath it, right? So we don't put them in two different workspaces. Technically, they could or we can create bills of materials that pull items from different workspaces.

As an example of that customer I was telling you about, they do food services. They have a workspace for components. They have a workspace for raw ingredients. They have a workspace for finished goods, OK. And that's OK. You can have different workspaces with your items or your components, and then pull them into a different workspace to build your bills of materials.

But in this example, everything's all in one workspace.

So if we want to just create a manual bill of material-- actually, I'm going to jump over to a different workspace. I have one here called For Importing. I'm just going to go ahead and take a top level assembly. And here's one that I imported using a hierarchy. And we'll talk about that here when we get to the hierarchy.

But you can see there's bill of materials structure underneath. When I click on the Bill of Materials tabs, it opens up, shows us our different top level components. If I expand that, we can see that we have sub-components under some of these. So we have sub-assemblies, right. The sub-assembly consists of those components.

Now, I'm going to actually combine two methods here. I'm going to use the clone, but I'm not going to clone the bill of material. I'm just going to clone this over to a new number. So maybe this is going to be a -1. So I can go ahead and give it a different number.

Again, normally, this would be done through some sort of scripting, some sequence or something where the numbers are being generated for you automatically. But in this case, I'm just going to do that manually.

And I'm using classification, which we can use within our items. This is going to be a BOM. It's going to be a finished assembly.

And I have some information that I can fill in about that finished assembly. But in this case, I'm just going to go ahead and skip it. Go and hit Save.

All right, so I've cloned my item. I did not copy over the bill of material. As you can see, when I click on the Bill of Material tab, there's nothing there. It's just my top level, OK.

To do something manually, we just go ahead and select Add. Now, when we do that, we specify, where does it go to look for components? Now, this is where we could have multiple item workspaces that it would go and look at those four, three, five, whatever workspaces we have. And we would be able to see all of that in here. So you specify where you can pull your components from.

And you can search. So in this case-- let me just put in an O-ring for example. I'll just type in "O-ring." I have some to choose from.

But notice-- and again, we'll talk about the working versus the release versions. But we're getting just the working version. So it's the latest version in Fusion Lifecycle. We're not specifying if this O-ring had multiple revisions-- rev A, rev B, rev C. We don't choose that. We just choose the working version, which, in fact, is the latest one.

I'm going to go ahead and grab that O-ring. Hit Next. Got to put in a quantity. So I'll say that there's two of them.

Now, what if the component didn't exist? We can create them on the fly right here. So in the same mechanism for adding existing items, we can create new ones.

So I'm just going to go ahead and grab a new one, give it a new number. Now, putting in a number description, "new part." And we'll say Save and Add. Go ahead and hit Next.

And when we get done-- oops, keep forgetting the quantity. Nice thing about Fusion is it tells you when you mess up. Now, when you can see when we get done, now, we have a structure of two components.

So again, manual process, we use this for editing, taking things in and out of the bills of materials. We could add a sub-assemblies in here. So this is where you build from the bottom up, OK. So now that we have this new assembly, we could use this in another assembly.

All right, so let's take a look at the import tools. Now, when we import, we have our different choices here.

First of all, the first thing there is called Items Details. This is if we're just creating items, OK. If we're just going to generate items within Fusion Lifecycle, we'd use this. We're not building any bill of materials structure.

The next three are the three that I mentioned, parent child, hierarchy, and the level. Now, when we look at these, they're very specific. Again, how to format them?

So if I look at my Excel spreadsheet here, I've gone ahead and formatted it out the way it needs to be. I have a parent column. I have a child column, a quantity. I've got some other fields of information in there, estimated cost, a unit of measure, which again, when we're doing bills of materials, we always need to pay attention to the unit of measure. So if it's feet or inches or liters or, in this case, each, if we are importing into classification.

Now I have classification on my workspaces. I'm not actually setting them during the import here. But that can be done, OK. So classification is just if we're classifying parts as, you know, screws versus nuts versus wires, connectors, things like that.

Now, the tricky thing about the parent child, is, again, we have to create the items first. I can use the same spreadsheet for that. Takes a little bit of extra work, but let's just go through that real quick.

So I'm going to say a Parent Child. I'm going to choose my file. And we'll say PC-- just give it a name. You can always go back and take a look at these imports and see what you've imported.

You can't swap out the spreadsheet. So if you make changes to your spreadsheet, you do have to create a new import. But you can go back and take a look at what you did.

Now, I already messed up. I just realized that, because I said, parent child, we have to create the items first. So what I should have done here is gone and said Items Details. That's OK. We can always redo stuff.

So grab my spreadsheet again. And let's say "create PC items." Hit Create New.

Now, I have three columns here. I have a parent, a child, and then the part number. In this case, I'm just generating the items. So I'm going to use the number. On these imports, it's very easy to just match things up. So in my spreadsheet, I have a column called Number. That's going to be my part number. So I just say number matches part number.

My quantity, I don't care about quantity yet, because I'm not doing the bill of material. But I'm going to go ahead and put in my cost. And I'm going to put in my unit of measure.

Now, there's already items in my workspace. So I have to tell Fusion, what if there's already an item there? How do I determine if there is one there and how to match that up?

So there's this little feature here called Match On. And we specify which column we want it to use to sync these up, because down here at the bottom, we can say, OK, for new records, we want to create those. For matching records, we want to update them.

So this import tool is not only just used to create things. It's used to modify things. So if we want to change the structures, if we want to change the item's details in a mass amount, right-- we don't want to go in and open up a thousand records in Fusion Lifecycle and change, you know, a field. We can do that through Excel and through this import tool, OK.

Picklist, I usually say Error, because I don't want to create anything new on my picklist.

And I go ahead and hit Save. And what it does is it does an evaluation. And we look at the problems. And I can see, oh, I've got a couple errors.

Now, I know what those are already, is I have a couple of components that are repeated. So because I'm creating these items now from scratch, it's like, you can't have two of these.

So I can just go ahead and remove one. And this is what's nice, is I can edit right here in the import tool. I don't have to go back to the Excel spreadsheet. And I'm just going to remove one of those, OK.

And you'll see now, I've just got warnings. And I know what those warnings are. I'm actually pushing values into a field that's read only. So it says, OK, when you're done with this, you can't change it. That's fine. I understand that.

So I'm going ahead and hit Run. 17 records were created.

Now, if I go back out here, and I can go back to the one that I already created and edit this one, OK, same spreadsheet, now, I would need to tell it, well, what's the parent?

I'm going to match that up to the number. I'm going to say, "match on as the BOM parent." Again, there's these little drop downs on these columns. My child is "match as BOM child." It's under the BOM fields.

So this is where a lot of people get messed up. It's like, oh, how do I map this out? How do I get this stuff, you know, corresponding? You've got to understand where the stuff is. You know, what's a BOM field versus what's in your items fields?

So as soon as I selected the number as a parent, I've got the option here to do the BOM child, OK. Not worried about the part number. I've already created that. I need to tell it what my quantity is for my BOM. And the rest of this, I don't really care about. In fact, I'm not going to even remap that.

Again, new records, add. Actually, I want to error, OK. I don't want it creating any new. And here's my now BOM relationships. Go ahead and add to the workspace or update if there's anything existing. Hit Save.

I had a BOM child. That's one of the joys of live demoing, right? OK, let me cancel out real quick and do a new one. And if this one doesn't work, we will move on, because we don't want to waste all your time.

Parent child. PC. Create new.

All right, again, we're going to map this to our number. Set that as our parent. Set this as our child. Our BOM quantity. And we don't need anything else. Records, add, update, error, add to the workspace, update. Hit Save.

All right, much better. No problems, right?

One thing I don't need is I don't need that top one. I'm actually going to take that one out, because that top one, its children or ran in the rest of it. So to ahead and hit Run.

You see here, five records will be updated. What that means is those records are going to be updated because the structure is changing. And then 17 relationships will be created, OK.

Now, if we go and take a look at what we did-- just back over here, we'll go and look at that workspace real quick. And that one was called "PC2." And we can see, we have the structure and everything now imported in. And it has all the PC part numbers, OK.

So again, that's the most complicated one. That's why I wanted to show it a little bit if you guys decide you want to use that one.

Now the level BOMs and the hierarchy BOMs, they're very simple, very straightforward. The spreadsheets are just one column. You don't have to worry about a parent child. In this case, like I said, the level BOM is very simple to do.

The process for the importing is the same. We just have to specify which column we're using for the level BOM. OK.

And then cloning, I've already shown the cloning. So I don't need to go through that again. The only difference there would be is if we want to clone the bill of material, we can go ahead and just check that check box. Again, you're going to get a same bill of material as you had on the previous one. All right.

Now the one method I didn't mention is what I call the "Cadillac," OK. And that's integration. It's another way to create bills of materials. This is where we're going to create this from another system.

Again, most of you guys have this information somewhere today, right? You're building it in your CAD assemblies, so you have a CAD BOM. You might be using items in Vault. So you're generating a full bill of material in Vault. And maybe in your-- well, it should be in your ERP system. But we can integrate into those systems with Fusion Lifecycle, OK, and pull that information over with effectivity dates, with different trigger points.

And that's why I call it the "Cadillac." We're not re-entering anything, generally, right? And that's where most companies want to get to, is this point. Again, it's a little bit more advanced. We're not going to talk about that today.

But the last thing there I would definitely say is, "validate before you automate." So if you look into doing this in Fusion Lifecycle, make sure your processes are what you want them to be. Make sure your structure's the way you want-- or your items' details, you know, what information you're capturing. Don't jump right into integration before you've used Fusion for a while and have gone through the manual methods.

So our first recommendation to our companies are let's do it manually first, and then we'll automate next, OK.

So BOM usage. So you have a BOM, now what? So what, right? What do we do with it? Well, people are going to consume this information. That's why we put it in there. So how do we consume it and consume it in a very efficient manner, is we use these things called BOM views.

Now, this is not to be mistaken as configurations. OK, we get asked that a lot. Is this going to be like, I can have a different configuration of this bill of material, maybe for we manufacture it in a different location or different sites, right? Part numbers change because plant A does it different than plant B.

That's not what Fusion Lifecycle is there to do for you. That's more in your ERP or execution system.

The BOM views are simply simplifying how the data looks in that view. And we can create those views based on roles.

So like, maybe for example, if I'm in purchasing or something, I want a view based on costing. If I'm in service, maybe I want a view based on warranty and service. What's serviceable in my bill of material and so forth?

The rows don't change, OK. So these BOM views, the content does not change, just how we're viewing that content.

We use these views also for exporting. We'll get to that a little bit later. But we can export these bills of materials. And again, to Excel, Fusion's very well integrated into Excel for usage in other places. So we can set up our views to set up how our columns are going to look on that export, OK.

And we do have the ability to flatten our bill of materials. So if we want just a parts list, a lot of companies have that need as well.

Now, the thing to understand about the flat BOMs is that you can't configure columns and things like that per se. It's going to be what's given there. But it gives you a complete parts list.

And then we can also use this concept of BOM-only fields. So things that are not controlled at the item level but are controlled at the bill of material level, OK. And I'll show that here in a little bit, talk about like, maybe, a substitute part, OK.

We can also do BOM roll ups. The common one here is costing. We want a total cost.

Weight is another good one, right. If we're pulling weight over, maybe from our CAD models, and we want to see what's the overall weight of this thing, we can use these roll up techniques so that we're putting that information into each item, but at the bill of material, it's rolling up to a top level number.

We can also use check boxes. So we can do Boolean roll ups, so if checked boxes are checked at the item levels.

Compliancy is a good example of this, OK. If you have a reach compliancy, for example, you may specify on your components that those parts are compliant. Then as they go into the assemblies, you can see at the assembly level, hey, everything in this assembly is compliant.

And you can do Any Checked or All Checked. So we have reverse logic on that.

And then on the currency-type things, we have this override versus adjustment concept, OK.

Now, with override, what that means is we can take all those components and add them up. And if they add up to $10.25, we can still put at the assembly level that it's $11, right. We just want to override it with a cost that we want to put in there.

With an adjustment, we can actually put things at the assembly level that then get added into the bill of materials. So maybe packaging or glue or adhesive, you just want to capture that information. Maybe it's not part of your bill of material, but you want to put that cost in.

So if your parts add up to $10.25, and you put in $0.75 at the assembly, your overall adjusted cost then would be $11, OK. So we have that ability to manage these roll ups in those manners, which, again, every customer kind of has a little bit different needs in how they want to do that, OK.

So let's take a look at these. I'm going to go over to this one.

So I have this scuba regulator. I don't know how many of you guys scuba dive. I do, so I thought, this would be kind of a neat data set to use. It's a first stage off of a scuba pro regulator. And it's kind of a nice small data set. So I thought it would be good to show. We can do a lot of things with it. And it won't take too long to get through them.

So these BOM views that I was talking about are right here. Now, I've created some of these.

These are created by an admin. They're not something that users can go out and just create on their own. They will have to go back to their PLM admin and say, hey, I need this kind of view. Can you create it for me? And they more than likely will. But I have some already done.

The default view is just that. We can modify the default view. That's an option. I have one here for alternate substitutes, costing, exports, service roll ups, and warranties and services. So again, things that companies might be using their bills of materials for.

If I look at costing, what you'll notice is the columns change. And again, that's what's changing, not the content. But now we've added over there the cost per each and the total cost. So we know this assembly is $67.19. And we can see through each of these what each assembly costs, OK.

Now, on the sub-assemblies, we'd have to break those down a little bit to get into their cost. So, for example, on this yoke assembly, for example, these parts all added up equals to $15.78.

Now, one of the things I've always kind of looked for is, well, how do I get that cost back onto that sub-assembly, OK? There is some scripting that we can do. So right now, I'm trying to show you what's out of the box, what's real simple easy for people to get to and they can achieve very quickly.

But I can see a lot of customers are saying, well, you know, I'd like to have that $15.78 transferred over to the item itself. It can be done. It takes a little bit of extra to work to do that. OK, but this is an example of that roll up cost.

Now, if we go and jump over here to where the administrator would be creating these views, this is what it looks like. And again, I don't want to dive too deep into these. But I wanted to show you like, in this total cost, for example, it's a very simple thing to do.

Right now, I'm with "sum with override." So whatever I put in that value, that's what that value is going to be. If we wanted to change that to one of our other options, here's our "sums with adjustments" and so forth.

Now, the lowest number and the highest number, we do have those other two options. I didn't mention those. I have not really seen those used too much, but they are there if you want to roll that up to find the lowest costed part. So what that would do is roll up the cost of whatever the least cost part or the maximum cost part is in that assembly. OK, so that's an option there as well.

These views are pretty simple to create. Generally, we start with one. We have a cloning feature in there. So we can just clone an existing view and then modify it per our needs. But again, this is something that your administrators would do.

Let's take a look at a BOM-only field so you kind of get that concept. So here, I've created this field called "alternate substitute." This is common in a lot of companies, right? We have alternate parts. And we have substitute parts.

And I guess there's two concepts there. I've kind of seen it as, well, if I say that this part is available to be changed out for part A, well, is that across the board, or is that only in some specific assemblies that those parts are allowed to be substituted?

Well, we can do both, OK. So by setting this here, we're saying that these parts are alternates or substitute parts for this particular bill of material, OK.

Now, if we took this information and took it down to the item level and said, OK, for item A, we can always use item B as an alternate, then that goes into all assemblies, right? Then that item can be swapped out in any assembly. And we can bring that information up here as well.

But in this case, I was just doing this as for this particular bill of material, these two parts, these are alternate parts for them. And the way we work with those is we create a view. We add those BOM fields into this view. And then we can simply just go in and edit the bill of material and choose those alternate or substitute parts.

And in this case, they're actually linked to our workspaces. So we're selecting real parts that are making real hyperlinks back to those components. So when somebody is viewing it-- if I get out of the edit mode-- if they simply just want to click on it, it'll take them right to that record.

And now we're into that other record. You can see the cost is a little bit different. We can see maybe it's a different vendor, supplier, whatever information we're tracking about them.

So this is the BOM views.

The other thing we can do is flatten our BOM, like I mentioned. And everybody kind of understands that. What we do is we take the structure out. So everything comes up to the top.

So in some of these, we have this O-ring. I have two sub-assemblies that are using that O-ring. One uses five, and the other one uses two. So what you see at the end here is we have seven total. So this bill of material has seven of these parts in there.

This is, again, really good if we want to get a parts list to somebody. Just, hey, what does this assembly contain? We don't care about the structure. We don't care how many levels deep it is. We just want a pick list to go get all the parts.

We would usually use a flat BOM. And then from here, we typically would export this out to Excel. But we're going to get into exporting in just a little bit. But that is an option to just dump this out. But this gives us our total number of parts. OK.

So let's talk about effectivity. This is always an interesting subject that I have with our customers. What does effectivity mean to you?

In fact, Tony and I were just talking about this earlier, engineering effectivity versus manufacturing effectivity. Now, I've always taken effectivity as what does my ERP system say when things are going to happen, right?

So it can be set up different ways. What I've kind of set up this example for right now is I'm thinking of it in terms of when would you want to push this stuff over to ERP, right, or when an ERP is the actual execution of it?

Because what we can do is we can add in disposition into our bills of materials. So when we're making changes, as an engineer, I'm going to say, well, I'm going to scrap this component. Scrap is scrap, right? So that should be triggering somebody over at manufacturing that, hey, we need to get a new part. And as soon as those new parts are in, they become effective immediately. And these other parts go out versus used up, right?

That effectivity may be different because you might have 10,000 parts. We might use 1,000 a day. You know, we got 10 days of inventory or whatever it is. That determines the effectivity date.

How you use it in Fusion is really up to you, OK. But it has that ability. And that's important because if you're integrating into other systems, you're going to want to know how it applies in your system.

If you're using it just manually without pushing it into ERP, for example, then I would say it's going to drive more from an engineering effectivity. OK. When do I say these parts should no longer be used?

But this introduces us to this concept of working versus released. This is unique to Fusion Lifecycle. I've used other PLM systems. It's a little different concept. But what a working version is is it's between the latest production or latest release going to the next version, OK.

When we create a brand new item in PLM Fusion, it's automatically the working, right? It's the latest. When I go to rev A production release, there's a working version there, OK. You just don't necessarily see it. But what it is is it's going to be. That's what the next version is to be.

OK, so working versus release, it gets to be a little confusing. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it today. But it's good to understand this concept, especially when you're starting to talk about looking at effectivity and how those BOMs are changing around things.

Now, all of this bills of materials and items and things like that, it needs a mechanism to change. How do we change a bill of material? How do we change an item? Change orders, right? What do they call them, ECOs, ECRs, ECNs. Everybody's got their different terms. Or just CNs, I guess.

But inside of Fusion, there's a tool called a Revisioning Workspace, which is our change order. That's what controls this. And that's what will make our changes for us. So it's very important to understand both of them and that you need one. And you can't have the other without it, really, otherwise you just have everything stays at the working version and never changes.

We can see our bills of materials at different dates. Again, back on effectivity, what did this bill of material look like last week? What's it going to look like six months from now if there's pending changes, OK? These are things that typically we wouldn't see but in ERP.

Now, I don't know about you guys, but a lot of companies I've worked at, they wouldn't let us in ERP, engineering. I don't know why. But maybe they felt we would take it over.

But we don't know when these things are supposed to happen or what they looked like before. So it's a very good configuration change management tool from that perspective.

We can do revision pinning. Again, I don't see this very common. But it does have that capability of doing that. And what that means is I can pin this revision in this assembly. So no matter what happens to this part, if it goes from rev A to rev B, that assembly is still going to use rev A, OK.

Again, not real common, but I know in aerospace this happens sometimes. I forget what they call that documentation. It's been a while. But where they have to track a particular assembly builds with particular revisions. So we have that.

Changelog gives us our traceability, what's going on with this bill of material, OK. So all of this is impacted on the changing of the bill of material.

There is a comparison tool right inside of Fusion. There's a little screenshot of it. We'll get in and look at it live here. But very nice graphical shows us what's changed.

You know, we have the two different revisions, production A versus a superseded 2. Now in this case, the reason there's 2's in there is those were pre-release revisions, OK. So we went 1, 2, 3, 4, and then we went to production rev A. Well, what was the difference between them? What did 1 look like or what did 2 look like versus rev A?

So it shows us what went in, what went out, what actually changed. This redlining tool is really big for people to go back and see what happened.