Generic Bill-of-Materials-and-Operations for High-Variety Production Management

Abstract

High-variety production like mass customization is facing the challenge of effective variety management, which needs to deal with numerous variants of both product and process in order to accommodate diverse customer requirements. To utilize commonality underlying product diversity and process variation, it has been widely accepted as a practice to develop product families, in which a set of similar variants share common product and process structures and variety differentiates within these common structures. Based on such variety implication, this paper proposes a data structure, called generic Bill-of-Materials-and-Operations (BOMO), by unifying Bills- of-Materials (BOM) and routing data into a single set in order to synchronize multiple perspectives on variety such as customer ordering, product engineering, and operations planning. A generic structure is accordingly developed for characterizing variety effectively. The merits of the generic BOMO for integrated product and production data management are detailed in terms of order processing, engi neering change control, production job planning, cost accounting, as well as integrated material and capacity planning. An implementa tion of the proposed generic BOMO methodology in customized souvenir clock manufacturing is also reported.