Function: Product engineering

This function defines or modifies product specifications. This function can be implemented as part of a product innovation project or, in an engineer-to-order environment, as part of a customer-oriented project. The product definition is created based on functional specifications of the product and the technical constraints.

The operations include the creation of an E-BOM/ P-BOM and generic BOM, codes, groups, drawing locations, and so on. The activities performed in this function mainly describe the characteristics and data setup of an item.

Although separate engineering typologies are not defined, the manufacturing typologies are used to distinguish the processes because engineering is so closely related to the production environment.

Product engineering is developed for various environments, such as Repetitive, Job-Shop, and Mixed model flow. The Repetitive/Job-Shop processes are for standard products, whereas the mixed model flow processes are for complex products.

An important issue in this area is the reuse of existing components. Keeping track of product specification revisions is also of great importance and can be controlled by means of the EDM module. In this flow, both simple and more complex change orders are modeled. Mass BOM changes are useful for mass updates, such as replacing item A with another item B in all E-BOMs in which item A occurs.

The product engineering procedure for repetitive production or job shop production environments does not contain facilities to configure items that contain options. This process uses EDM without Mass BOM Changes. Extensive approval procedures defined in the Object Data Management package can be used to approve the new revisions created in EDM.

If you choose not to use EDM, you can enter item data through the item base data flow. Subsequently, you can maintain bills of material through the process engineering processes.

The objective of the process is to show all the steps to set up generic product data.

The objective of this process is to show all the steps to set up a product structure for a generic item that will be produced in a mixed model flow production environment