Generic bill-of-materials-and-operations for high-variety production management

High-variety production like mass customization is facing the challenge of effective variety management, which needs to deal with numerous variants of both product and process in order to accommodate diverse customer requirem ents. To utilize commonality underlying product diversity and process varia tion, it has been widely accepted as a practice to develop product families , in which a set of similar variants share common product and process struc tures and variety differentiates within these common structures. Based on s uch variety implication, this paper proposes a data structure, called gener ic Bill-of-Materials-and-Operations (BOMO), by unifying Bills-of-Materials (BOM) and routing data into a single set in order to synchronize multiple p erspectives on variety such as customer ordering. product engineering, and operations planning. A generic structure is accordingly developed for chara cterizing variety effectively. The merits of the generic BOMO for integrate d product and production data management are detailed in terms of order pro cessing, engineering change control, production job planning, cost accounti ng, as well as integrated material and capacity planning. An implementation of the proposed generic BOMO methodology in customized souvenir clock manu facturing is also reported.