Case study 4. Process industry (Food and material industry)
- The need for BOP due to the increase in SKUs and support for high-performance products

There is a common point in the food and materials industries that, production in both industries is carried out on the basis of "recipes" that explains "what kind of ingredients" and "how are they blended".

In the food industry, recipes and processes are always linked to each other to manufacture food products. On the other hand, the digitization of information in upstream processes has not been progressing, and recipes and processes are still managed using Excel software or groupware.

However, recently, the number of SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit; The smallest unit of sales order, purchase order and stock control) has increased dramatically due to the diversification of consumer preferences and marketing strategies. As a result, the number of products with the same content, but with different packaging and packages and labels by season, sales area, size, etc. have been increased.

In this situation, processes are dependent on individual skills and there is a requirement of BOP that can digitize information from the upstream phase of the process and convert it from summary information to detailed information, and hence there is a tendency of continuous increase in the introduction of BOP in these industries. There is a sense of crisis about strict quality standards that protect the safety and security of foods that people eat. Therefore, stricter control is required as it will not only damage the brand of the company at once but also cause an impact on its survival, in case any trouble is occurred,

On the other hand, in the materials industry, originally the product is made by putting certain number of materials into the product manufacturing furnace and operating the equipment automatically. In addition, it has the feature such as manufacturing a product without stopping the product manufacturing equipment. As a result, there was not much focus on information transmission functions (BOM+BOP) from upstream phase such as information transmission from upstream phase of engineering to downstream phase and smooth application of engineering changes. However, in recent years, there has been a tendency towards high-mix small lot production such as high-performance products, and the need to introduce BOM and BOP has begun to emerge to meet this trend.

This time, we have introduced a movement and trend of BOM and BOP usage by industry such as purpose and several case studies.

In the same way that there are BOMs by use of application which have been created according to the purpose of each department across the product life cycle, BOPs by use of application are also created and utilized with enhanced BOP information according to the purpose of each department, such as standard BOP, processing BOP, assembly BOP, instruction sheet BOP, maintenance BOP, etc., from the engineering phase to manufacturing and maintenance. In addition, we believe that there will be requirements for matrix BOPs in terms of complexity of variations and their standardization.

In addition, in order to realize a manufacturing system and DX that are resistant to changes, we believe that the redevelopment of PLM as an information sharing platform that can interconnect and consolidate the information by linking the engineering chain and the supply chain, starting with BOM and BOP, which are standard information for manufacturing and can freely define BOM and BOP by use of application according to the business type.

In the next column, we will introduce the various benefits of BOP and the new value of PLM with examples of BOP utilization.

Effective utilization of BOP Vol.3: Merits of BOP and new value of PLM