BOM & Routing Manager

Know what a change actually breaks, before it breaks it.

Two documents decide almost everything in a manufacturing business: what a product is made of, and how it is made. Purchasing buys from the first, planning schedules from the second, and costing prices from both. When either is quietly wrong, everything built on it is wrong the same way, and you find out when a batch is scrapped.

An engineering change gets assessed before it is applied. Where is that part used, at every level. What is on the shelf, what is half-built on the floor, what is already on order. What the new version costs against the old. Then a recommended date: use up the good stock, or cut in now and scrap it, with the scrap figure attached so the choice is informed.

Nothing is applied retroactively. What you built last month was built to last month's version, and the record keeps saying so. When a failure gets investigated a year from now, the question is which revision was in force that day, and there is an answer.

A monthly sweep for the errors that cost real money. A bill that contains itself. A part that says each where your supplier ships by the metre. A subassembly marked as never stocked that has forty on the shelf. A quantity that is out by a factor of ten. These are cheap keystrokes and expensive discoveries.

Standards that stay honest. Every quarter it checks what things really cost against what the system says they cost, and how long operations really take against the standard time. It splits a cost miss into a price change and a usage change, because those are two different problems with two different owners.

Works with whatever system holds your bills of material, routings, and stock.