High variety impacts on Bill of Materials Structure: Carmakers case study
Résumé
The great variety of offerings from companies engaged in mass customization such as in the automotive sector, implies millions of end products. As in the case of carmakers, this variety proceeds from the combination of dozens of optional or alternative components. A number of technical or commercial constraints prevent most combinations of alternative components (ACs). In these conditions, the creation and updating of the full set of the Bills of Materials corresponding to each end-product is extremely complex. Additionally, customers may not define their product requirements by specifying a list of alternative components because of the number of alternative components (including some entirely unknown to them) and their interdependence. In the past 25 years, scant research has been dedicated to Bills of Materials representation problems in this context. The most exciting ones use predicates to formalize combinatorial constraints between ACs and introduce a ‘generic Bill of Materials’ concept to avoid an exhaustive description of all end products. Additionally, product description for customer purposes was streamlined through a further concept – the set of alternative services (SAS). This approach, implemented by several carmakers in the last fifteen years, superseded the traditional approach to bills of materials, though it never gave rise to the theoretical exercise described here that involves an analysis of its impact on bills of materials and on operational and tactical decisions. It describes the product based on its market features, before moving on to the actual ACs combinations based on predicates for alternative services (ASs). We show how some carmakers successfully use the AS concept to support sales at configurator level and address operational production issues.
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