Developing a STEP-based integration environment to evaluate the impact of an engineering change on MRP

The technologies of concurrent engineering (CE) have been applied widely in recent years. Most of the developed CE methodologies have been focused on integrating design tasks with manufacturing related activities. In addition , the development of STEP standards has provided valuable resources for the exchanging or sharing of life cycle product data. In this paper: an integr ating environment is proposed to link the design tasks with one of the majo r, functions in production management, the material requirement planning (M RP) activities. For each engineering change activity, the engineering bill of material (EBOM) data about the changed design stored in a CAD database t rill be extracted and transformed to manufacturing bill of material (MBOM) data stored in the MRP database. The data transferred from the CAD environm ent to the MRP environment are based on STEP standards. Then, modified MRP records will be generated and compared with rite original data. Based on th is information, the designer can determine an appropriate design alternativ e such that the impact on the inventory can be reduced to minimum. The prop osed framework was implemented by integrating several commercial packages.