Migrating product structure bill of materials Excel files to STEP PDM implementation

It is important for manufacturing companies to provide a standard for product data exchange between diverse computer systems. Past attempts to develop neutral format standards for data exchange have had limited success, and have led to the development of STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product) as a data exchange standard. The STEP standard makes it easier to integrate systems that process various product life-cycle functions, such as design, engineering, manufacturing, logistics support, and will help to facilitate concurrent engineering. The goal of this paper is to facilitate the computer-readable exchange of the product bill of materials (BOM) information for product data management (PDM). In this paper, the STEP ISO 10303-21 is implemented to share the product data information in a manufacturing environment. A structural product bill of materials is first transformed into an Excel file format, then a PDM Schema Exporter is utilized to export a BOM Excel file to a STEP Part 21 file. A C# program decodes the STEP file into BOM information to update the PDM databases in SQL server for product data management. Also, SAS code is written to generate the indented bill of materials from the BOM information, to draw a tree diagram to present an accurate structural view of a product, and to export to PDM databases for product data structural view.