Bill-of-material (BOM) structures describe the component structure of a product, most often as a tabular structure implemented within a relational database system. The conventional approach is to design a unique BOM for each model or variant of a product. This becomes impossible with a mass customization production, where the number of variants goes into high numbers and the final product can not be determined until customers specify it. The generic BOM solution is to describe and maintain one generic structure that encompasses all variants of a product. This structure may then be used to generate a BOM for each particular product variant, which the specific BOM can then be used as a basis for production control. Earlier attempts to develop a generic BOM processing system have been dire...[ Read more ]

Bill-of-material (BOM) structures describe the component structure of a product, most often as a tabular structure implemented within a relational database system. The conventional approach is to design a unique BOM for each model or variant of a product. This becomes impossible with a mass customization production, where the number of variants goes into high numbers and the final product can not be determined until customers specify it. The generic BOM solution is to describe and maintain one generic structure that encompasses all variants of a product. This structure may then be used to generate a BOM for each particular product variant, which the specific BOM can then be used as a basis for production control. Earlier attempts to develop a generic BOM processing system have been directed towards improving the conventional tabular structures. These efforts have several limitations, mainly because the tabular structure does not offer the flexibility needed to describe generic structures. In this thesis, we implement a generic BOM based product data management system. The core of this system is that the description of the generic BOM structure is based on an object-oriented programming language. This generic BOM language notation makes it possible to describe the set of possible variants of a product. The user can explode (execute) any part of the generic BOM to define a specific product variant by giving his/her specification. The system will then automatically generate a specific BOM for this particular product variant. The prototype system is developed using KAPPA-PC (version 2.4) to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the generic BOM methodology.