Simplifying BOMs
Asset-Intensive companies use BOMs to order parts, conduct maintenance and to ensure that machinery and operations are conducted in an efficient fashion. All too often though, they lay riddled with misinformation, incomplete lists and other errors and complications that drag down their overall effectiveness. Worse, they may be so unreliable they don’t get used at all. This leads to a reduction in wrench time and a whole slew of additional errors. By simplifying BOMs; overcoming these obstacles is a manageable task, taking you from A to B much sooner.
What are some of the major problems that are associated with BOMS?
BOMs are expensive to create and maintain.
In order to create BOMs, you need to first clearly and accurately identify the equipment and key attributes that will allow you to track down the correct vendor documentation. Oftentimes tracking down the vendor documentation can be time-consuming and may involve contacting the vendor. Then you need some with domain expertise with the equipment to organize the equipment assemblies intelligently and decide which parts should be in the BOMs and at which level. Finally, you need to figure out whether these parts or acceptable substitutes already exist in your procurement system, create new ones where required and track down all of the required supply chain information needed to create parts in your systems. Layer on top of that big company data management, approvals, IT process and rules and it gets even more expensive at most large asset-intensive companies.
And once you’ve created a BOM they can quickly become out of date as vendors recommend different spare parts or your procurement team implements any changes to your supply chain. You need to update and maintain BOMs frequently. This can be a major challenge at-large asset-intensive companies without the right people, processes and objectives in place.
So, what are some simple strategies to successfully navigate this landscape?
What does an effective BOM strategy look like?
- Prioritize
Don’t try to have BOMs for every piece of equipment. Machinery that rarely gets serviced will likely have outdated BOMs, which results in confusion and wrench time wasted. Avoid this hassle by only creating BOMs for equipment that gets maintained on a regular basis.
- Consistent Data Standards
Ensure that your BOMs have data standards that are the same across the board. This will lead to less confusion and will increase ease of access among all of your workers. Furthermore, it will help prevent a knowledge gap between existing and new employees as all necessary information will be clear and consistent.
- Focus BOM building on maximum ROI
BOM building is not a cheap operation. They are expensive to build and maintain. The focus of your BOMs should be on frequently maintained equipment and machinery that is critical to production. This will ensure that resources aren’t wasted on BOMs that deliver minimal ROI to your business.
- Don’t let IT drag you down
Make sure that your supply chain and IT services are in a place to properly and responsibly maintain your BOMs after the BOM building project is disbanded. Having BOMs that are difficult to update due to preexisting IT regulations overcomplicate and increase the maintenance cost.
- Use an efficient BOM building solution
Excel is not an effective BOM building software as it is inefficient and error-prone. Software such as NRX AssetHub allows existing BOM data to be imported with ease and assets to be visualized via hot-point diagrams to create effective and simplified BOMs for any business.
How can NRX Help?
NRX AssetHub provides maintenance and reliability professionals at asset-intensive businesses with world-class software solutions for analyzing, visualizing, building, editing, organizing, approving, and sustaining high-quality Asset and Maintenance Data for the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Computerized Maintenance Management (CMMS) systems. Our software allows users to easily import spreadsheets and other materials to help visualize your data and BOMs. We help our customers get their CMMS data right. To learn more about how we can help with BOM building projects check out our Building BOMs brochure or contact us at 1-877-603-4679.
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