AN OBJECT-ORIENTED BILL OF MATERIALS SYSTEM FOR DYNAMIC PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

In this paper, the bill of materials (BOM) system is defined as the ce ntral hub of a general product data management (PDM) system that provi des essential data for running a manufacturing system to produce produ cts. Information that is relevant to products and their components is defined in the BOM. The information is critically related to data from product design, manufacturing planning, production management, procur ement, inventory control, and accounting within a company. A conventio nal BOM structure (or product configuration), which manages data only in a stand-alone relational database management style, cannot satisfy the needs requested by all departments within a company. A BOM should relate to and communicate with other domains of the information system . In this research, a newly designed BOM system uses the object-orient ed programming (OOP) concept to represent product information. The obj ect-oriented BOM (OOBOM) system can capture and encapsulate data that will simultaneously serve the information needs of various departments . In order to manage product data dynamically, the system provides sev eral interfaces for easy data access and manipulation. The linkage bet ween BOM and its corresponding CAD/CAM system is enabled through the X -window manager: thus an integrated PDM environment is developed. This product management approach improves the consistency and efficiency o f product data representation.