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Share Your Bill of Materials: Connecting PDM, PLM, and ERP

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说明

Bills of materials (BOMs) serve several purposes throughout a product lifecycle. While BOM data is usually created by CAD designers and managed in product data management (PDM) systems such as Vault software, it also needs to be shared with departments outside engineering where BOM information is used for production planning, assembling, or purchasing. Each of these steps requires a different view of the same BOM. Sometimes BOMs even need to be extended with information such as "work stages" or "work orders.” Sharing and enriching BOM information is usually done in systems other than Vault, such as Fusion 360 Manage or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This class will explore bills of materials and their different uses. We'll showcase different ways to share BOM data among product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, PDM systems, and ERP systems. And we’ll analyze the available APIs to help you implement BOM workflows among Vault Professional (PDM), Fusion 360 Manage (PLM), and ERP systems.

主要学习内容

  • Explore the different forms of a BOM in CAD, PDM, PLM, and ERP, and learn how different departments use them
  • Learn about the concepts of sharing BOM data between CAD, PDM, PLM, and ERP
  • Discover the tools and APIs available to share BOM data between Inventor, Vault, Fusion 360 Manage, and ERP
  • Explore a sample implementation that shares a BOM between Vault, Fusion 360 Manage, and ERP

讲师

  • Christian Gessner 的头像
    Christian Gessner
    Christian Gessner is a co-founder and Head of Research & Innovation at COOLORANGE. In this role, he drives research into cutting-edge technologies that enable customers to effectively automate, implement, and customize Autodesk CAD, PDM, and PLM solutions, ensuring seamless integration with enterprise systems. With over 25 years of experience in full-stack software development, Christian specializes in Autodesk product data and lifecycle management and Microsoft development technologies. Before founding COOLORANGE, he was a member of the data management software engineering team at Autodesk.
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      Transcript

      CHRISTIAN GESSNER: Hi, and welcome everybody, to Share Your Bill of Materials-- Connecting PDM, PLM, and ERP. My name is Christian. I'm a co-founder and technical evangelist with COOLORANGE. At COOLORANGE, we develop software and offer services to help our customers and our partners being successful with Autodesk data management.

      In this class, I want to talk about the challenges, and about potential solutions, we at COOLORANGE experience when we connect different business applications. The focus will be on the bill for material, or BOM, and on PDM, PLM and ERP systems. And before I get started, please do not consider all what's going to be said as rules.

      So what I'm going to present is based on my personal experience-- on the experiences that we gathered during the last 10 years, when we worked on form integrations and synchronization projects. And I want to let you know what needs to be considered. By no means this is complete. So, especially because we only get 30 to 45 minutes this year for these presentations. I cannot guarantee to make this complete. However, you should know what needs to be considered.

      Now with that being said, what can you expect to see in this class? First, we have a deeper look at the different types of bill of materials, and we explore some differences. Then we compare the business applications-- Vault, which is in 360 Manage, and ERP systems, to see differences and how they handle BOMs. We will see what applications can be used to overcome some of the issues that we will learn. And we will see how to synchronize data between these systems. Finally, I will show you an example implementation, that demonstrates how an engineering BOM can be converted to a manufacturing BOM, by doing some restructuring and enriching the bill of material with work orders or similar information. So stay tuned, and let's get started.

      The first thing-- the first and probably most important fact I had to learn when I started implementing Vault and ERP systems, which was probably 10 years ago, was the fact that bill of materials are different. They have different types. A BOM does not always equal a BOM. And the authors of Manufacturing Data Structures, Jerry Clement, Andy Coldrick, and John Sari, compare a manufacturing company with a restaurant. And I like this analogy, since like in manufacturing, restaurants also deal with data.

      They have the menu for their customers. And they have the recipe as their single data foundation. They have a menu that contains different dishes. All these dishes consists of different ingredients, and they must be put together in a specific order and with the right production processes to make the ingredients to a real dish. Right? And there are also dependencies when manufacturing-- I'm sorry. When a manager-- manufacturing comes later.

      When a manager changes the menu, and adds or replaces dishes, someone from purchasing to know that other ingredients, new ingredients, other quantities, needs to be purchased. Also the chef needs to know about this change so he's able to cook the dish in time, preferably right when a dish is ordered. So good restaurants, they have to know that-- everybody who's working in this restaurant have to be on the same level, have to use the same data foundation, in order to minimize their waste, in order to be well organized, in order to use all the resources properly, and with that, be profitable and successful.

      And in manufacturing companies-- and this is where manufacturing comes into consideration. In manufacturing companies, we have the exact same situation. We don't have menus and recipes, but we have our bill of materials, or BOMs. Instead of chefs, sous chefs, waiters, dishwashers, or managers, we have different departments such as purchasing, or engineering, production planning, production services, manufacturing, sales, and so on. Right? And there we have different peoples with different responsibilities.

      So when Sabrina from purchasing looks at a bill of material, she's interested in quantities, vendors, lead time, stock, things like that. Michael from sales needs to know about values of these products, prices, right? Manuel from the service and maintenance department, needs to know about assemblies, and which spare parts are available. What prices do these spare parts have? He probably wants to submit a change order because, on site he finds out that the product needs to change.

      Martin from manufacturing at the other hand, he's interested in things like, he wants to assemble these. So what's the right order to assemble my products? Raw materials, positions, parts, assemblies. And finally, Marcos from engineering, he's working on the functional design. He is interested in things like, where is my product? Or where's this assembly? Or where is this part used? Do we need raw materials? What positions, what parts, what assemblies? And things like that. Visual components is probably an issue.

      So everybody is looking at the same data foundation from different angles. And unlike in a restaurant, in manufacturing companies, we already see a lot of different IT systems, that are all trying to deal with this data foundation. And even now, in times of Industry 4.0, all these systems often get manually synchronized, or even worse, not synchronized at all. People send emails with Excel spreadsheets, asking somebody else to update data. Or a poor guy with two displays in front needs to transfer data between an ERP and a PDM system. Right? What a poor guy.

      A couple of weeks ago, I've spoken to a customer. And there was a lady who was whose job-- whose full day, all day long job-- was to degrading and updating bill of materials in SAP, by manually typing positions, quantities, and item numbers from a printed piece of paper. That's a terrible waste of resources. And I don't mean the paper when I say this. So what can we do? Let's simplify things in order to find this out. So according to our experience, this is how the real world looks like. Companies want to exchange items. They want to exchange bill of materials. And they want to exchange documents.

      And from a purchasing or production planning, from an ERP point of view, we speak about topics like make or buy, lead time, prices or resources. The PDM perspective, however, the engineering perspective, it's all about the functional design. Like I named it before, components and technical specifications and things like that. The PLM, at the other hand, where quality, production, service, maintenance, support, sales, is using these PLM products. They deal with topics such as change orders, quality assurance, stock, spare parts, and things like that.

      And as a foundation, and what they at the end all need, is some sort of change orders to change the data. To change the items, with that to change the bill of materials, and also to change the documents. But when we emphasis on the bill of material, now, we see that even there, is a lot of differences.

      We see a lot of different types of bill of materials. The exact format and type of these bill of materials can be different in each company, depending on the nature of product that they are manufacturing. However, overall, I personally have seen five different types of BOMs so far.

      The engineering BOM that actually reflects the way a product was functionally designed. Then the manufacturing BOM that reflects the way a product will be manufactured, obviously. The procurement BOM or the work in progress BOM, that captures bought in components. The sales BOM that reflects the final sold or ordered product. And the service BOM, which is a list of all the serviceable parts. However, EBOMs, or engineering bill of materials, and manufacturing bill of materials, MBOMs, are the most frequently used ones, especially when it comes to connecting or synchronizing this data with PDM, PLM, ERP systems.

      So with all these different BOMs, in which way we want to use it, we always have two choices. Either all the departments, all these different departments, all these different people, they agree on a single BOM. So they work out a BOM that fits to all of these guys. And everybody is happy and can retrieve the information that he or she needs from that single BOM. This is very hard to achieve, at least from what I experienced, and therefore it's a very rare case.

      The other option is to have multiple bill of materials, the bill of materials for different purposes. But this also means that these different BOMs need to be synchronized. Whenever a data foundation underneath changes, whenever the bill of material changes on the EBOM side, it needs to be updated or synchronized with the MBOM. And in order to do this synchronization, we have to understand the differences, first, I think.

      The EBOM comes from the mechanical engineering. It's initially created using applications such as Inventor or AutoCAD or SolidWorks. And it reflects the way the product was functionally designed. It maintains relationships between the components and tells about structure. And it also contains engineering specifications, such as specifications of components, of parts, tolerances, operating temperatures, weights, unit of measures, dimensions, and things like that.

      The manufacturing BOM, at the other hand, defines a list of items that are required to build the product, so that it can be shipped to the customer. This may include things like packaging materials, boxes, labels, stuff like that. Help manuals, assembly instructions, or like manufacturing process descriptions.

      And the big difference between the EBOM and the MBOM is the way that they are structured. EBOMs are often structured the way engineers designed the product. And MBOMs are often structured based on how the product should be manufactured. Anyways, EBOMs, or engineering bill of materials are actually found in PDM systems, such as Vault, since they originated there. Like, they are originated in Inventor, but then finally saved in the PDM system in Vault Professional. And they also can be transferred to PLM systems, such as Fusion 360 Manage.

      The manufacturing BOM, at the other hand, I think the sweet spot for this information is always the ERP system. The problem here is, that often ERP systems cannot get the engineering BOM and turn it into a manufacturing BOM. So some conversion is needed. Another great spot for a manufacturing BOM is the PLM system, because it's so flexible, especially in Fusion 360 Manage. The workspaces are highly customizable, so I can use this to retrieve the engineering BOM, convert it to a manufacturing BOM, and then finally send it over to the ERP system. And we will see an example of how this gets done later on.

      But now that we have seen the differences in the data, and what's different in all these different BOMs, we also have to have a look at the different applications that are saving our bill of materials. Let's see how Vault, Fusion 360 Manage, and ERP systems handle BOMs differently. And we need to know later on the differences when we-- well, you need to know these differences when we are about to connect and synchronize the systems.

      All right. Let's get started with Vault. Vault, or especially Vault Professional, is the place for our engineering BOM. This is the place where everything gets started. A file gets checked in and Vault derives the bill of material from the CAD data, from this file, from applications such as Inventor or AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, or even SolidWorks. Right? Another option in Vault to create a bill of materials is the manual way. Like, you can create a new item, and then to this item you can add new BOM rows, and with that, creating a BOM manually. So in Vault, there is this differentiation between CAD and manual item types.

      Whenever a BOM is created automatically by deriving from the CAD data, it is automatically linked and also synced to the files involved. So also, Vault is fully aware of the CAD BOM. What does that mean? When a file gets checked into Vault from Inventor, Vault understands and extracts all the functionalities, such as normal parts, reference parts, purchase parts, phantoms, and so on. It understands virtual components or even group positions from Inventor, and saves that information in a CAD BOM. This CAD BOM is not displayed to the user, but used by the Vault item master to fully understand the BOM that is going to be created.

      Also we need to know that there are instance properties involved. And the most important information here on this slide, when it comes to synchronizing data between the different systems, is a BOM in Vault can contain multiple rows with the exact same item number. Why is this important? We see it in a second, because our systems handle this differently.

      So let's have a look at how Fusion 360 Manage, for instance, manages their engineering and manufacturing BOMs, or their BOMs in general. First of all, and that's the big difference, unlike Vault, Fusion 360 Manage requires unique item numbers. That means that a bill of material cannot contain multiple rows with the same item number. So whenever we synchronize data, we need to consider this.

      Also another functionality which is unique to Fusion 360 Manage is pinning. Pinning allows you to hard code a particular version of an item in the context of a particular parent assembly. And like Vault, it contains different views. And since Fusion 360 Manage workspaces, are so highly customizable, I personally would say it's suitable to save or to store engineering BOMs, as well as manufacturing BOMs.

      And then we have the ERP systems. And I mean, you can see screenshots here from SAP. You can see screenshots here from Microsoft Dynamics Navision. It doesn't matter. First of all, an ERP system can have a different item number or part number, as we know from the PM or PLM system. That's one big difference. Sometimes the ERP system also, in addition, needs to be used as source for the item numbers. So for instance, when we create a new file in Inventor, we may want to have the item number already as the file name, or as a part number, as a property on the Vault file, or on the Inventor file in Vault.

      So the ERP is often the source of truth when it comes to numbering. Also due to its typical users, it should store the mechanical-- I'm sorry. The manufacturing BOM, not the EBOM, not the engineering BOM. The problem I have learned, and I mentioned it before, is that not a lot of ERP systems can convert ERP-- not a lot of ERP systems can convert engineering BOMs into manufacturing BOMs. So whenever we build integrations, we have to make those integrations clever enough to do this job for us.

      And besides that, we have to know that in order to save bill of materials in ERP systems properly, we often need to enrich our data with information, such as, which plant, which stock, which shelf is this product live in. What's the change number, when we're going to change the data? Our bill of material, is it valid from, and is it valid to? Things or information that needs to be extended on the data in the ERP system. All things that we need to consider.

      So we know about the differences of a BOM itself. And the key differences of our different applications that maintain and store our bill of materials. Now, we also need to talk about other technical challenges. And not only challenges, but also solutions. And I'm very happy to be able to present some solutions to all these problems.

      So first of all, when we talk about Vault, Fusion 360 Manage, and ERP systems, we are facing a hybrid IT landscape. What does that mean? Vault, that means Vault actually lives behind a firewall. It's on prem. It's in our local network. And this makes it hard for cloud applications to reach it directly. So whenever our ERP system is in the cloud, it's hard to go through the firewall to notify directly from the ERP system, to our PM system to Vault, to inform and communicate changes.

      This changes a little bit if the ERP system is also behind a firewall, which can be the case. But even then, we have the problem of different languages. All these systems talk different languages. We have different APIs in Vault. Vault is using a .NET framework. An ERP system is using something else, and probably doesn't have even access to .NET, or anything like that. By the way, API is a application programming interface.

      So bottom line, these applications they can hardly communicate with each other. So there's a translator needed in between. Also when we talk about Fusion 360 Manage, and put this into consideration. This has the same problem as an ERP system that's in the cloud. It cannot pass the firewall. But luckily, there is some technology out there to overcome all these issues. We have the underlying [INAUDIBLE] tools that every developer in the world can use to write on code and programs to solve these issues.

      On the Vault side, we have the .NET framework API that allows us to communicate with Vault, exchange data with Vault. We have scripting, and REST API, and Forge webhooks in Fusion 360 Manage, that can be used. And depending on the ERP system, we may have technologies like SOAP APIs, REST APIs, database access, or even .NET APIs, or other APIs such as SAP BAPIs, to do the communication, to exchange data with these systems.

      And on top of that, we see existing technologies that make use of this core technologies, and are served as a product. And the first thing that we have to look at, is how to connect Vault and ERP systems. At launch, we have a Vault to ERP connector, which is called powerGate. With powerGate, we already connected over 25 different ERP systems. We have hundreds of projects worldwide. And powerGate helps our customers to automatically transfer items, bill of materials, and documents, and other data if needed, from Vault to the ERP system.

      And how this look like is, powerGate acts as a middleware. I prefer to say translator. It at one hand, understands the Vault world very well. It's very well integrated into Vault and Inventor, and speaks the Vault and Autodesk language. At the other hand, we have plug-ins that support different ERP systems. And now powerGate acts as a middleware and a translator, so that Vault understands the ERP language, and the ERP system vice versa, understands the Vault language. And with that, it can exchange data in a very elegant way.

      So items, BOMs, and documents are supported out of the box, but also other entities, such as vendors or suppliers, can be used using this technology. And to make it more clear, I want to show you a short video. So here we see Vault and we selected a file. And this file has additional tabs. It shows SAP data. For instance, the SAP material tab shows life and bidirectional ERP data. So when we change anything in the ERP system, SAP in this case, and save this information over there. And we go back into Vault and refresh the view, we see immediately the changes. So it's not synchronized. It's live data.

      Then we have the bill of material, which gets now synchronized. We have this tool integrated into Vault, that allows us to bulk create all the items that are part of the BOM. And we also use this tool to compare, check and transfer the bill of material from Vault into the ERP system.

      So when I click here on transfer and go over, I see an additional tab that directly shows me the bill of material from my ERP system. And in my ERP, system if I change this data now, or I delete a BOM [INAUDIBLE], and then I go back into Vault, and launch the dialog to do the comparison once again. I immediately see there are changes. My Vault BOM is different than my ERP BOM. And I can use this tool to synchronize the data once again. It's that easy.

      So powerGate is integrated into Vault, Inventor, or even AutoCAD if needed. And mechanical engineers can work in their well-known environment in Vault. It displays the ERP data live, in Vault or even in the Inventor UI's. And it allows you to change the ERP data directly from within Vault, without the need to go over to a different application.

      powerGate has this built in BOM compare dialog, that allows you to compare, create, and also update items and multi-level bill of materials. And because it's highly integrated into the Vault workflows, it also can be used to ensure data integrity. And I think this is a very crucial point as well. So for instance, it can check if the ERP data is synchronized, before an item or a file gets released in Vault. Also, powerGate works in Vault Webgroup or Vault Professional, because it can either utilize the files, or your items, to synchronize the ERP items and bill of materials.

      All right. So we have communication between Vault and the SAP system or the ERP system. Now let's have a look in connecting Vault and Fusion 360 Manage. And also here, at launch, we have a product that is called powerPLM. powerPLM connects Vault and Fusion 360 Manage. And just like powerGate, it's a middleware. At least, it's sort of a middleware, because there is a big difference. Unlike powerGate, which is a real middleware and hosts itself, powerPLM, to connect Vault and Fusion 360 Manage, runs and relies on the Vault job processor.

      Let me show you a short animation to explain how this works. So in the middle, we can see the Vault server, which has a Vault job queue and data. And there is even Vault options visible to users. And at the bottom of this animation, we see the Vault job processor, which is a dedicated machine where we install powerPLM. And as an administrator, I can use a dialog that's installed with powerPLM, and available in the Vault UI. And I can set my Fusion 360 Manage credentials. I can do settings, and work on property mappings between the entities from Vault and Fusion 360 Manage. And administrator sets this up once. Saves it to the Vault option.

      And now whenever a user in Vault changes a item or file state, a job automatically is queued in the job queue. And the Vault job processor, together with powerPLM, gets the job from the job queue and executes the job. While it's executing, it knows about the Vault options. So it reads the Vault options. And it also knows about the entity from Vault that's going to be executed.

      So it saves all of that locally, then it uses the mappings to create an object that fits to the Fusion 360 Manage workspace. And it uses the options to authenticate with Fusion 360 Manage. And with this information, it can reach out past the firewall, and create or update items in Fusion 360 Manage.

      The other way around, we talk about synchronization. So we not only talk about transferring data from Vault to Fusion 360 Manage. We talk about it the other way as well. But there is this firewall, and the firewall blocks us actually, from writing directly from Fusion 360 Manage into Vault.

      So this product comes up with the solution that is using a time trigger. Every like, minute-- sorry. Every minute, every 10 minutes, every hour, depending on what is set up, a job gets added to the job queue. And then the process is very similar. The job processor gets the job from the job queue. The job processor gets the settings the administrator set up earlier. And this information is used to do the authentication-- [INAUDIBLE] Forge authentication, by the way, if you're interested in technical facts.

      And then it's going to read the Fusion 360 Manage workspaces, with the information needed. It applies the property mappings. So that an object exists that fits into the Vault item or file [INAUDIBLE]. And this can be used to be added or updated in Vault.

      This is how it works in theory. So let me show you the items and BOMs workflow that transfers items and BOMs from Vault to Fusion 360 Manage in a short video. We see the item with the data in Vault. We see there are attachments, and there are related files to these items. We see a bill of material. And very important, we see three identical BOM rows-- by identical, I mean three rows with the same item number.

      And when I change the state and release the assembly and all its components, a job gets triggered-- multiple jobs are triggered. And the job processor executes that and writes that to Fusion 360 Manage. So if we go over to Fusion 360 Manage now, we see the item metadata has been populated. We also see the primary file information is there as well. So information from the file that is linked. We see the different attachments that automatically have been uploaded to Fusion 360 Manage. And we see the bill of material. And most importantly, we see the three BOM rows have been merged into one single BOM row, so that Fusion 360 Manage is able to save this data.

      That's the workflow. And it's a summary. We have this Vault item-centric workflow. So data that has been derived from the original CAD data, and is involved as items in BOMs in the item master, is published. The metadata have been published. The primary linked file metadata as well. This includes details such as the Vault thin and thick client links, but also other information. And not only the items, but also the bill of materials has been transferred or published. This includes the merged bill of material rows. This also respects rows that manually have been added to the Fusion 360 Manage workspace.

      It also populates a cutting list. I didn't show this in the video. But in order to not lose the raw information, the three items with the three different lengths and quantities, there is a cutting list populated. And it also respects raw materials as well as virtual components. And as we have seen in the video, it's uploading the attachments, not only from the item itself, but also from the associated files. And this is a pretty cool fact as well. There is a dedicated workspace in the Fusion 360 Manage app store to support this workflow out of the box.

      So we have also seen how to connect Vault and Fusion 360 Manage in a proper way. There is one thing that is-- well, that's sort of a pain in the neck. It's how to connect to Vault from outside a firewall. We have seen in the case of the Vault and Fusion 360 Manage connection, there is this polling going on. Like every 10 minutes, the program needs to check if there is data changed, because there is no way to pass the firewall. But luckily, Autodesk is aware of that. And there will be a solution soon, I hope.

      Currently what we see, and what I present is a technology preview and not officially available yet. However, it shows that Autodesk thinks and goes into the right direction, I would say. So I found this blog article from John de Hartog, a product director at Autodesk, back in August 2020. It talks about the Vault roadmap, and reveals, I would say, plans to work on something that is called Vault Cloud Connect. And John describes it as follows. "Another big one is a new capability we call Vault Cloud Connect, which is an option to extend access to Vault data to specified collaborators of interest, including different suppliers or collaborators outside the firewall." And that's the key thing.

      That's a very interesting technology. And I instantly applied for beta testing, and this is what I found out. So Vault Cloud Connect-- I think meanwhile also known as Vault Gateway-- is a service inside the network that needs to be registered on the Autodesk servers. And once it's registered and started, it creates something like a tunnel. It's not a VPN. It's some sort of tunnel. I think it's WebSocket technology, anything like that. But it opens a tunnel to this cloud service, and with that, enables the communication.

      So you get a public URL, and this URL can be used by the Vault Explorer, or even by our integration tools, to establish a communication through the cloud platform into the local network. And that's a really cool thing. And I think that's going to be a game changer. And very cool technology, that hopefully is available soon. And since it's on the official roadmap, I expect to see something official hopefully very soon.

      But for now, this is a technology preview. It needs an invitation by the Autodesk Vault development team. And as I said, it needs to be enabled or registered. But then it supports all the different clients and add-ins. And by the way, you may have seen this as Vault Gateway, Vault Forge Connect, Vault Data Cloud Connect, or Vault Cloud Connect. If you're interested in more details, then you can always contact your Vault development team.

      So a lot of cool technologies that we have seen. And to finally round this up, I want to talk about how to do migration, or how to assemble a manufacturing BOM out of an engineering BOM. And this is the piece that is finally missing, I think. And there is a tool available-- a tool created by Sven Dickmans from Autodesk-- that allows Fusion 360 Manage users to convert engineering BOMs to manufacturing BOMs, by adding operations or similar information, and by restructuring the BOM.

      So it is going to present this customization in a separate AU class. So if you're interested, visit this class. I really recommend this. And I just show some highlights in a video, that shows how cool this technology is. So first of all, Sven created a workspace that contains an engineering bill of material. And as we can see, this contains elements in the UI to open a so-called MBOM editor. And the information that we see here, the bill of material, that has been transferred from Vault using powerPLM previously.

      But once we click on this button, we see this cool tool from Sven that allows us to highlight, to select, to filter in a graphical way, our engineering BOM. So we can select components from the engineering BOM. We have tools that allow us to see the quantities from the engineering BOM, versus the manufacturing BOM. To compare these BOMs. And with that, to add the engineering BOM components to a manufacturing BOM.

      And then we can use, either graphically or the list, to work on this manufacturing BOM enhancements. So we can get this data, the components, from the engineering BOM. Select it, and put the right amount of instances to a manufacturing BOM. And once this is done, or even while this is done, we can also add operations such as assembly instructions, or let's say, what components are needed to assemble the backplate, in this instance. So we can add this operation-- backplate assembly-- and then we can assign the different components that are needed in this assembly step.

      And the manufacturing BOM editor helps us to see what's going on. And it also helps us to automatically get the right components into the right assembly instructions, or right operations that are needed to manufacture this product. Also it comes with a lot of cool options such as color coding, or details for use. For instance, here on the right hand side, we see the Details pane. While selecting the engineering BOM components, we see enriched, enhanced information. And also we see a color coding which is pretty cool. Let me switch that on.

      So we see this color coding, that tells us which components from the engineering BOM have been put to the manufacturing BOM already. And we can go even further and allow the viewer to show our status colors. I'm sorry. And we can use this view to see what has already been put to the manufacturing BOM and whatnot. And with all this information, somebody can create a manufacturing BOM in a meaningful way, having the tools to see what's missing, what needs to be done, and if everything is completed or not.

      And finally, when the manufacturing BOM is completed, you can save this dialog. When a manufacturing BOM using this dialog, and you end up getting a manufacturing BOM as an entity, as an item in a separate workspace in Fusion 360 Manage. And this information can then finally be used to transfer it over to ERP or PDM system. So, that's cool, isn't it? Don't miss Sven's class, with the title BOM Transforming Align, Engineering, and Manufacturing Bill of Materials.

      So we are finally at the end of this presentation. And all there's left for me to do is, to have a short conclusion. A former Autodesk employee who heavily deals with bill of materials, once said, "the top waste people want to eliminate is a need to entering information manually from one system to the other, and keeping information in sync." And during my last 10 years dealing with bill of materials, I can 100% agree.

      But we have seen that all the tools are out there to build and synchronize bill of materials, and use them as a data foundation in our engineering companies. And for us, I think it's finally time to take advantage of all these latest technologies. And our customers or our employees, they will highly appreciate that.

      Our engineer, Marcus, can continue to use Vault. He's used to Vault. He wants to focus on engineering. Sabrina from purchasing, or Michael from sales, they can use their well-known ERP systems. And Manuel or Martin from service, maintenance, or manufacturing, they can work in Fusion 360 Manage, all on the same 100% up to date data foundation. All on a BOM with just information that they are interested in. And this increases productivity and efficiency. It leads to less errors and less waste.

      With all that being said, thanks for watching, and talk to you in the Q&A session. Bye bye.