Introducing Product Structure Management

Until recently many companies have been dealing with the problem, which master data is needed to model a configuration product? To solve this problem, your company might have been using Variant Configuration with a super BOM for existing master data.

You are now looking for an alternative that allows you to define a product configuration early without materials or bills of materials. Therefore, you decide to use Product Structure Management (PSM).

PSM offers a platform that is suitable, not only for development, but also for managing the entire product life-cycle. PSM offers more functions for modeling a product than the standard BOM.

The purpose of the Product Structure is to create a product description that is free of redundancy. The aim is to create not only a Product Structure, but also entire groups of similar products, some of which may have a high degree of variability.

The Product Structure is the basis for all processes along the supply chain. It is a highly integrated data model that supports efficient IT management of product structures.

A structure node (or product item) represents a function or product group. It isn't a material. You can define variants within a node. These variants, in turn, define non-variable parts or optional parts.

In the early product development phases, a material doesn't have to be assigned to the variants (as is the case during prototype development). But later on materials have to exist before production starts, however, since material planning and goods movements can't take place without them.

You can test the individual concepts as part of the overall conceptual design for the product. You can then transfer (overwrite) a concept to the variant as a result.

You use Product Structures to represent the product creation, especially products with many variants and many BOM items. You can set up and manage a Product Structure without having to maintain materials at an early phase of the development process. You can map configurable products with the Product Structure and manage non-configurable products with assemblies and fixed variant assemblies in the Product Structure.

Therefore, Product Structures allow a multilevel hierarchy and the multiple usage of nodes. An integration into guided structure synchronization for the handover of the engineering BOM to manufacturing is also available (next lesson).

The product item variants are specific representations of a component and represent the optional parts of a product.

One important link in the value chain of an enterprise which develops and manufactures products takes the form of the interface between product development and manufacturing.

The task of product development is to develop, validate, and document a product in accordance with certain requirements. Once the product has reached a certain level of maturity, the product data – usually consisting of drawings, documents, material records, and parts lists – can be handed over to manufacturing.

The process of PSM to BOM synchronization is embedded between product development and manufacturing planning, and works as an interface between design validation on the engineering and process design on the manufacturing side.

Before the synchronization of a Product Structure into a material BOM happens, a Product Structure has to be defined.

Two possibilities exist: creating a product structure with a template or without a template.

The following video shows, how Product Configuration Modeler Thomas defines a new Product Structure without using template. His Product Structure follows an assembly structure later used inside material BOM.

Product Configuration Modeler Thomas has defined a Product Structure without a template. But the new forklift prototype does not extremly differ from the previous ones. Therefore Thomas decides to use a template.

The following video shows the use of a template when creating a new Product Structure.

Working with the table view of Product Structure, Thomas realizes, that a more structured view could be interesting.

The following video shows the structured view of Product Structure.

Working with a template does not mean, that you are not allowed to change or extend the existing structure.

The following video shows, how Product Configuration Modeler Thomas extends the existing data. He adds a Product Item Variant and extends the object dependencies.

Now that Thomas has saved the defined object dependency, he wants to test not only this specific object dependency, but the whole model. Therefore, Thomas creates a simulation, which can be seen in the following video.