Automatic generation of a bill of materials based on attribute patterns with variant specifications in a customer-oriented environment

The configuration of product structures through a bill of materials (BOM) is the most important phase in an ERP implementation. A BOM describes the component structure of a product, usually as a hierarchical structure implemented within a relational database. These descriptions include the relationship between the end product, sub-assemblies and materials. The conventional approach for implementing these structures in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Product Data Management (PDM) system is to design a single BOM for each product model. However, this becomes impossible in a customer-oriented production, where the generic product is defined through a set of attributes, which may have alternative values. Since the number of variants may run into high numbers, it is very expensive to design and maintain the BOM structure for each variant. In this paper, we present a specific method for the automatic generation of a bill of materials based on attribute patterns with variant specifications in a customer-oriented environment. As a result of applying the method, we are able to create automatically the right codification and the full tree structure. The method may be implemented in any ERP system using relational databases. A complex industrial application is presented to validate the proposed method.