Engineering data management summary

You can use the Engineering Data Management module in Manufacturing to support the registration of a product's design process, dealing with different versions of products. In addition, this module is used to transfer the design data to production.

Engineering items

Engineering items are items to which you make design changes. If the design process is finished, you can transfer the changes to actual items. An E-item can exist as several revisions. Each revision is an improved version of the item.

You can attach drawings to E-item revisions with the Document Management module of Data Management.

Engineering bills of material

An engineering bill of material (EBOM) describes the relationships of components to their parent items the same way as a production bill of material (PBOM). The main difference between an EBOM and a PBOM is that EBOMs use different revisions of E-items, rather than having a sequence number to account for items that are valid on different dates. Record the components of E-items in an EBOM with the Engineering Bill of Material (tiedm1110m000) session.

You can use unit effectivity to model various product configurations of the E-item. For more information on unit effectivity, refer to Unit effectivity in EDM.

You can use reference designators in the EBOM to indicate where a component must be mounted on the main item. For more information, refer to Procedure for linking reference designators in the EBOM.

Changing the EBOM

  • Manual changes

    You manually create or change an EBOM for a specific engineering item revision. After approving the revision, the EBOM can be copied to to a PBOM. The effective date of the revision is linked to the PBOM lines. The expiry date equals the effective date of the next revision. For more information, refer to Changing EBOMs - Manual procedure.

  • Automatic changes

    You use MBCs to simultaneously perform multiple modifications of engineering data. For an MBC, you can define several actions to add, delete, and replace components in a series of EBOMs. If you have correctly defined your MBCs, you can process several of them together in the Process MBC (tiedm3250m000) session. For more information, refer to Changing EBOMs - Automatic procedure.

  • Semi-automatic changes

    You manually create or change an EBOM, after which you use an MBC to approve the changes. For more information, refer to Changing EBOMs - Semi-automatic procedure.

Unit effectivity in EDM

Unit effectivity can be used to model variations in the design of E-items. You can transfer the unit-effective data to the production environment so the variations are modelled in the production environment.