The complete bill of materials : a study in collaborative manufacturing

The effects of the bill of material on outsourced manufacturing environment are studied by gathering information on costs to implement a new bill of materials (BOM) transfer process, the potential gains to maintaining a complete bill of material versus the partial or complete embedding of data, and surveying the high-tech electronics manufacturing industry's practice in communicating the bill to their partners. This thesis deals with a telecommunications products company fictitiously named Telcom and its contract manufacturing partners. While much of the cost involved is the price of implementing an Information Technology system to handle manufacturing collaboration, the heart of the issue is the management of the BOM data. Thus, the inclusion of the often undocumented cost or benefits of migration and ongoing coordination and support would further complicate the decision to implement. Furthermore, downstream efforts in supporting this process change and the manufacturer's interests in providing quality and timely service to their partners implies a need to transmit the fully detailed or "exploded" BOM. In some cases, the company's engineers were reluctant to express support for the exploded BOM due to the expected significant workload increase, the perceived added cost in maintaining extra part numbers, and the low expectation of returns for the endeavor. When approached by the prospect to receive standardized formatting but a partially embedded BOM however, the manufacturers expressed concerns regarding lead time elongation and quality degradation. The results on the comparison of the expected costs and benefits of implementation suggest a need for a delivery of a consistently formatted and complete bill of material.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Hwu, Timothy Tingyaw, 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• James M. Masters.

• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28562

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/28562