Approach to structure management and customer-related configuration in the product lifecycle in mechanical engineering

Abstract

Complexity in the product and production process in mechanical and aerospace engineering leads to the existence of a variety of structures like engineering and manufacturing bills of materials. The manual or partly automated creation of these structures leads to redundant data and quality issues. This paper describes the approach of an integrated structure management based on a reference structure. The development of an integrated reference structure management approach aims to enhance the quality of a product in combination with concurrent complexity reduction. The reference structure is customer- or order-neutral; it is utilized as a basis for other structures. This paper presents a software system-neutral approach for the customer-related configuration of this structure resulting in e- and mBOM. The implementation of the method framework (selection of use cases) in a standard product lifecycle management (PLM) system is part of the research.