A generic bill-of-material processor using indirect identification of products

Abstract The industrial product market has become more demanding over the last decade. In particular, the number of product variants within a product family has increased very quickly. Therefore, the description of product variants in terms of product data and product structure has become a problem for existing production/inventory control information systems. In the first part of this paper we develop a classification for the existing solutions in the literature. In the second part we describe another solution, the generic bill-of-material, using indirect identification of products. The generic bill-of-material provides the user with a means of describing a large number of variants with a limited amount of data, while leaving the product structure intact.