A procedure-oriented generic bill of materials

Bill of Materials (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 customer-oriented production, where the number of variants may go into high numbers. The 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 variant. Earlier attempts to develop a generic BOM 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. We propose a generic structure based on a programming language notation. This notation makes it possible to describe the set of possible variants of a product by handling both functional and structural relations between components. The user can explode (execute) any part of the BOM to define a specific product variant. User specifications are given dynamically, as the generic BOM is executed. The system will then automatically generate a specific BOM for this particular product variant. A prototype system has been developed.