Managing Material BOM Changes with a Change Number

Bill of Material Management helps you create and maintain single and multi-level bills of materials (BoMs).

Use change masters to define, revise, plan, and release different effectivities of BoM changes at the component level.

Locate all occurrences of a component, across all of your BoMs with the "Where Used" function.

Use the mass replace or change function to update all occurrences of a component at once.

The following video shows the roles individual users play in changing a material BOM with a change master.

As you just saw, the process steps for revising a material BOM with a change master include:

• Understand at any time who has made a change to a bill of materials and why
• Create a new change number within the material BOM and use it directly
• Compare old and new development levels of the material BOM

BOM management provides functions for creating and maintaining single-level and multi-level BOMs.

Change masters can be used to define, revise, plan, and release different validities of BOM changes at component level.

With the where-used feature, BOM engineers can find all occurrences of a specific component across BOMs. In combination with a mass replace function, component substitutions can be easily managed.

In the upcoming video, you will first get an impression of how Production Engineer Eric creates two different change numbers with different validities. Then he defines the necessary object types to make a Material BOM change possible.

The following video shows how Samar, the BOM Engineer, first performs a material BOM creation together with an existing change number. Then inside material BOM he does a change with an existing change number. Finally he creates a new one and does again a material BOM change. At the end he checks the used change numbers inside the timeline.

Material BOM changes are done and the change numbers are not used anymore. Therefore Eric sets the change numbers to inactive.

The following video demonstrates this task.

In a second scenario, Eric again creates a change number. Samar uses this one to perform mass changes of material BOM components.

The following video demonstrates these tasks.

In this scenario, Samar uses a new change number, created by Eric, to hand over an engineering BOM to a manufacturing BOM.

The following video demonstrates this task.

Up to now, Samar, our BOM Engineer, has made BOM changes with existing material numbers. Some changes were done with a change number, some not. However, he has now reached the situation that he has to add a material, requested by manufacturing department, where a material does not yet exist. This would mean that Samar would have to describe this component in the BOM. He decides on a different path.

The following video demonstrates this task.

BOM Engineer Samar has previously worked with the maintain Bill of Material app. In doing so, he could edit the individual BOM or open the assemblies to edit them. In this case, BOMs are processed on a single-level basis. However, Samar now wants to display the BOM on several levels and process it if necessary. He wants to group components that do not have an assembly indicator.

The following video demonstrates this task.

Up to now, Samar has changed components by calling the appropriate Maintain Bill of Material app. He now notices that there is a suitable app for mass changes in the Fiori launchpad.

The following video demonstrates this task.

Up to now, the BOM Engineer Samar always made changes to the BOM header individually in the respective BOM. Now he is interested in mass changes.

The following video demonstrates this task.

Up to now, Samar has added components by calling the appropriate Maintain Bill of Material app. He now notices that there is also a suitable app for mass addition in the Fiori launchpad.

The following video demonstrates this task.

Now you should have an impression of "How to manage a material BOM with a change number".