Blog Sluder and Burmenko make a great Tuesday at SWW
I was pretty excited for my Tuesday sessions. Of the four I attended, two of them I had circled before I even left for Orlando.
The first was Phil Sluder’s “SOLIDWORKS Tips and Tricks”. I have been to several of Phil’s presentations before so I knew to get there early. I am glad I did -the line was very long to get in, and I would bet more than half of the people were turned away. Thankfully Matthew West recorded the session and posted it on the SOLIDWORKS blog. I urge you to take some time to watch it.
The other “red circle” presentation was “Introduction to Item Centric PDM in SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM” by Dan Burmenko. Dan did a great job introducing this new tool that arrived in the second [first] service pack of SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM.
Item Centric PDM gets its value due to the fact that for most companies there really is two different BOMs. The one the engineer produces, and the BOM that is used to procure all the parts needed to make the product. Two quick examples:
- Imagine your assembly requires three pieces of a 2″x4″, one foot long. Imagine you buy 2″x4″s in 8 foot lengths. Obviously you are not going to buy three 2″x4″s, you’ll buy one and cut it to the needed lengths.
- Oil, grease, paint, packing materials, pallets, etc. are items that you may not typically put on the engineering BOM, but often times this needs to be documented in some form.
These are two of many examples of how a item centric BOM can be helpful. I’ll probably have a blog post of the many other ways it can be used in the future….or maybe I can talk Vik into writing a white paper on it.
Bottom line: Item Centric PDM is a nice tool to help you bridge the gap between your Enterprise PDM and your ERP system.