Generic bill-of-material: a new product model

The supply of industrial products to the market has increased fast in the last decade. In particular, the number of product variants increases very fast. Therefore, the recording of product data and product-structure becomes a problem for the existing production/inventory control information systems. In this paper a solution for this problem is given in the form of the generic bill-of-material. With this generic bill-of-material, the bill-of-material structure for all variants of a product family is specified only once. This makes this bill-of-material structure highly transparent, and it enables the avoidance of redundancy.