Benchmarks for Aras / Dassault Systemes / PTC / Siemens Digital Industries Software

The importance of collaboration between E-BOM and M-BOM has been pointed out in this year’s Monozukuri White Paper, but it has not been easy to achieve this goal.

Leading companies in the aerospace industry collaborated to conduct a “Multiple View BOM Solution Evaluation Benchmarks” against the latest commercial PLM software solutions. It was concluded that, despite some caveats, the required functionality was practically available across the solutions.

The Aerospace & Defense PLM Action Group (AD PAG) has released a “Multiple View Bill of Materials (BOM) Solution Evaluation Benchmarks Report of Findings and Conclusions”.
It proposes a best practice approach that uses filtering to generate different views from a single PLM database based on the user’s role.

The benchmark was conducted by the following companies

• Airbus
• Boeing
• Embraer
• GE Aviation
• Gulfstream
• Mitsubishi
• Pratt & Whitney
• Rolls-Royce
• SAAB

PLM software vendors surveyed were

• Aras
• Dassault Systemes
• PTC
• Siemens Digital Industries Software

of which Dassault Systemes and PTC are participating in only partial verification.

Benchmark use cases

12 benchmark use cases (practical scenarios) were defined in the context of current and future business processes of AD PAG member companies. They have been defined in following four focus areas,

• Engineering release
• Supplier collaboration
• Bolted join
• Engineering to manufacturing

AD PAG’s domain expert, who prepared the use case and participated in the benchmark requirements review, served as the demo evaluator.

Conclusion

The integration, analysis and reporting of results is managed by CIMdata, with each participating software provider reviewing the results of their solution, while the reports are published on a generalized basis to avoid disclosing the results of a particular solution.

An overview is as follows.

On average, the four solutions “met” or “mostly met” 73% of the evaluation criteria.
27% of the evaluation criteria were “failed to show” or “minimally met”.

Thus, “A&D OEM Multi-view BOM management requirements are met or mostly met by multiple commercially available PLM software solutions.”

Summary

As noted in the report, currently available commercial PLM software already provides basic, if not complete, functionality for multi-view BOM use cases.

This report is a useful reference for manufacturers as they consider future BOM integration. The validation scenarios have been proposed by user companies and have been well developed through discussions.

With referring this guide, we think it’s appropriate to clarify the features and objectives of each company’s business and discuss them with solution providers such as software vendors.

This report is available on the web and can be downloaded.
In it, the details of each scenario and the evaluation of each item are described in detail.
Multiple View Bill of Materials (BOM) Solution Evaluation Benchmarks