Research On The Gbomp Technique And Its Application

As the customer requirement personalization prevails, make-to-order is widely accepted by many enterprises. The individual customer demand makes the process of products diversified. Therefore, the manufacturers need to provide products that meet well with the customer demands with respect to not only function and product structure but also customized product processes. The complex and changeable product structure and process bring new challenges to the Management Information System (MIS) of these enterprises.BOM is the foundation technique for developing enterprise MIS system. In the MTO environment, the traditional coding method cannot work well because of the overloaded workload and poor reusability with the basic data. The existing GBOM technique can merely support customized demands on some basic features of the product. This paper aims to develop a new MTO-Oriented BOM technique, which can provide overall customization of products, and at the same time, serve well the production department in planning, execution and control. Firstly, a new general product representation method is proposed. Based on the attribute-value representation method of GBOM technique, it divides the attribute into basic attribute and process attribute. To represent the product process information, the process-value method, the process routing representation method and the accumulated process representation method are proposed. GBOMP is proposed through integrating GBOM with the product process representation method. That is, GBOMP divides every node in the GBOM tree into multiple production stages according to its process routing. It can help the production management staff distinguish WIPs (Work in Process) which have similar basic attribute characters but differs in process information.Secondly, KBE (Knowledge-Based Engineering) theories are employed to construct the GBOMP-based product configuration methodology, including the product structure configuration method, the product attribute configuration method and the product process configuration method. The product structure configuration method provides the possibility to configure the product structure of different kinds of product variants flexibly. The product attribute configuration method builds the mapping relations between the basic attribute characters of parent and child parts, which can facilitate the production management staff to determine the basic attributes of child parts according to those of end items. And the product process configuration method builds the relations between the process attribute characters of the product and the process routing of its parts, which can help he production management staff to determine the process routings of child parts according to the process customization requirements. Therefore, based on the above method, it is now possible to determine the whole process and basic attribute information of its parts, i.e. the GBOMP information of a customized product, when its customer requirements are given. A GBOMP-based product configuration system,GBOMP Generator, is then developed, which can transform the customer order information into material requirement information automatically. In the MTO environment, the knowledge-based product configuration methodology brings great convenience to the production management staff who used to process the customer order and make the material requirement plan based on experience.Finally, a customer order management method based on GBOMP is put forward. A work-flow mechanism is employed to develop the customer order processing system, which primarily includes customer order entry, customer order audit, customer order check, etc. It is released that GBOMP can effectively support the customer to describe their individual demands on the product and can help the production management staff to determine the detailed information of each item required by a customized BOM information. Based on the above research, a GBOMP-based production management system is developed on the software development platform, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The system has been implemented in a hand tool manufacturer, which demonstrates that GBOMP can work well in order management and can provide strong support to the production and planning department.