Is Your Productivity A-BOM-Inable?

Did you know that the average manufacturing company enters the same BOM (bill of materials) information an average of 2.4 times resulting in thousands of lost dollars each year due to the time wasted along with associated data entry errors?

Examples of where the same information may be entered multiple times include:

• Information on individual items already stored within in your company item master database is re-entered by engineers in your CAD system to be placed in BOM’s on the drawing
• When a new item is created, information on it is entered in the CAD system to go on the drawing and then again into your company item master database
• Complete bills of material are entered into the CAD system on the drawing and then re-entered into your company bill of materials (ERP) system by engineers or data entry personnel
• Changes to existing items or BOM’s are made both in the CAD system and then again in the company bill of materials system
   

The problems above are especially acute in companies who design products with very complex multi-level bills of material such as engineered-to-order machinery or equipment. In addition, the need to input many complex bills of material in a compressed time period in order to get large jobs out the door can cause time-to-market and staffing level issues.

As companies are facing the need to become more efficient due to tougher economic conditions, meeting time-to-market challenges and reduced staffing levels, more and more of them are eliminating this obvious inefficiency within their organizations. The savings and payback can be tremendous. For example, if your company:

• Has an average employee cost of $25 per hour (including benefits)
• Inputs or edits (5) bills of material per day
• Spends an average of (1) hour per BOM
• Inputs or edits (20) items per day
• Spends an average of (5) minutes per item entry/change
• Works (250) days per year

you would save over $40,000 per year in hard dollars due to employee costs by eliminating the re-typing of item and BOM information. This ignores any savings due to elimination of manual data input errors.

At Hagerman & Company, we have a variety of ways to help your company achieve these efficiencies and savings. We can:

• Develop Visual Basic (VB) code to output BOM or item data from your AutoCAD^® or Inventor^® software in a format suitable for reading directly into your company business (ERP) system (thus eliminating re-typing)
• Develop VB code to allow engineers to drop complete BOM’s from your business system right onto your CAD drawings
• Develop an interface so that engineers can directly grab information from your item master database and drop it into your CAD system in order to streamline the creation of CAD BOM’s

In most cases, any or all of these options can be implemented at a surprisingly low cost resulting in a payback period of well under one year.

In addition, with Cyco’s new AutoManager BOM (AM-BOM^®) system, we can provide a fully integrated system including:

• Integration with your CAD software (AutoCAD^®, Inventor^® and/or Solidworks^®)
• Product data, engineering data and document management capabilities
• Automated workflow for project development, engineering change processes or any other company business process
• Full integration between AM-BOM, your CAD system and your company ERP/bill of materials system

As a final option, Autodesk is in the process of releasing its new ProductStream^® product as an add-on to Autodesk Vault^®. ProductStream will provide bill of materials capability and workflow capabilities in a future release.

For more information on how your company may benefit from any of these options, please contact one of the following individuals:

Andrew Hagerman
email: AndrewHagerman@hagerman.com
phone: 217/864-2326 x229

Matt Lane
email:MattLane@hagerman.com
phone: 217/864-2326 x226

We can work with your engineering and IT staffs to map out a solution to your specific needs and budget.