The Complete Guide to Bills of Materials (BOM) for Excellence in Facility Operations and Maintenance
Cekap Technical Services Sdn Bhd
Integrated Project Solutions Provider (Co. Reg. No. 199401009534 / 295213-P)
Bills of Materials (BOMs) are a key element in describing the configuration of a facility. They are a pivotal input for spares optimization
This write-up is your gateway to understanding, developing, and using BOMs in complex facilities. It describes BOM types, use cases, and taking advantage of artificial intelligence for BOM creation.
What is a BOM?
A BOM shows the configuration of a physical asset to some level of detail. A Single-Level BOM shows the configuration one level down, while a Multi-Level BOM shows a comprehensive breakdown of the configuration.
Most online articles and software solutions describe BOMs from the perspective of a product seller:?
A facility operator, on the other hand, is a product user. The only relevant BOMs in this context are Service BOMs that list the serviceable items of a product. For example, the MBOM for a junction box may show the breakdown of a circuit board to the level of capacitors, diodes, and resistors, but the corresponding Service BOM may stop at the level of the circuit board because that’s the lowest serviceable item onsite.
Service BOMs may be developed for:
The Concept of Equipment Class BOMs for Facility O&M
Conventional BOMs are for a single product, which is adequate for preventive maintenance, but less so for spares optimization, procurement planning and urgent maintenance requirements. Let’s look at why.
All manufacturers standardize parts across their products in the same class to save on manufacturing cost. For example, the drive shaft used in centrifugal pumps, reciprocating pumps, and other pumps within a specification range may be identical. Different manufacturers may procure the same parts from a supplier, but code them differently. There may also be parts in equipment that have been purchased directly a supplier that sells parts that are functionally equivalent to the original—these will be coded differently. An Equipment Class BOM unifies the “forest” of single equipment BOM trees across an equipment class. Such a BOM is key input for spares optimization, procurement planning and urgent maintenance requirements.
The Equipment Class BOM above is a simplified view of a graph (alternatively network or lattice) structure showing the interconnectivity of equipment, assemblies, and parts across an equipment class (pumps in this case). The weights associated with the links (not shown for simplicity) may be assembled quantities, maintained quantities, and so forth. If the Equipment Class BOM is constructed in a graph database, it’s possible to apply graph data science techniques to identify groups of identical or similar parts; their significance to the operation; and paths across the equipment class. We will see in the next section how these techniques can save millions of dollars in inventory and lost time waiting for urgently needed parts.
Leveraging BOMs for Enhanced Facility Maintenance
BOMs are pivotal for effective facility operation and maintenance. Let’s explore how you can harness BOMs for this purpose.
Spares Optimization
Facility operators seek to maintain a level of spares that balances the risk of lost revenue from equipment downtime against the risk of locking cash in excess safety stock. It’s mathematically established that aggregating demand can reduce the quantity of safety stock without increasing downtime risk.
If you have Equipment Class BOMs linking functionally similar parts, irrespective of how they were coded in engineering documents, you can use them to aggregate demand for parts accurately. The quantities associated with parts for this purpose will be the maintained quantities and not the assembled quantities. Ideally, it should include correlating factors. For example, a change of lubricating oil type may positively or negatively impact the demand for multiple parts.
Procurement Planning
BOMs should contain information such as original and alternate suppliers for parts, delivery lead times, prices, warranties, and carbon footprints. This information facilitates efficient and economical procurement.
Note: Some companies record this information in a material catalog.
Urgent Needs in Turnarounds and Corrective Maintenance
Regardless of how well planned turnarounds are, it’s almost certain that unexpected requirements for parts will occur. Time is of the essence when an unexpected requirement occurs, and Equipment Class BOMs can address this by identifying substitute parts in non-critical equipment. For example, if the rotor assembly in a pump is unexpectedly damaged, you could identify a replacement in a non-critical equipment through an Equipment Class BOM for pumps.
The same applies to urgent needs in corrective maintenance.
Preventive Maintenance (PM) is an instrumental component of any robust maintenance plan. Comprehensive BOMs allow maintenance planners to ensure that the required parts, consumables, and tools are specified for PM.
Challenges and Solutions in Developing BOMs
While BOMs are an essential tool in various industries, they are not always readily available or developed for facility maintenance and management. Several factors can contribute to this. Let's explore some common challenges and the solutions to overcome them.
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Missing Data
One significant hurdle in developing BOMs is the absence of comprehensive data. This could happen because the reference documents were incompletely transferred by the EPC contractor or original owner in a facility transaction. Or, perhaps documents transferred in paper form deteriorated, or modifications went unrecorded.
The typical solution is to request the missing data from the manufacturer or procure what’s available from a generic product cataloger. These are the only options available to a company operating a limited number of facilities. For a company operating many facilities, it’s possible that data missing in one facility is available at another facility. If you cross reference all data across the company’s portfolio of facilities, you may be able to fill in some data gaps. This is only feasible through artificial intelligence (AI) and graph technologies.
This is a typical BOM–material catalog workflow.
Some facilities still have legacy data in paper or scanned documents. Manually finding BOM relevant data dispersed across thousands, even millions, of pages in such documents, and then transferring them into a machine readable form such as Excel for all the steps in the workflow, is time and cost prohibitive. It’s also error prone, because many tasks are typically assigned to humans without engineering knowledge.
Typically, operators solve this by developing a limited set of “operational” BOMs from SPIRs (Spare Part Interchangeability Records) transferred by the EPC contractor. The problem is these SPIRs are usually only available for some equipment, and only show parts that need to be changed in the early part of that equipment’s life cycle. The ideal solution is to build “assembly” BOMs providing detailed information about the configuration of equipment. Again, this is only feasible using AI technologies. Graph technologies aren’t needed for developing Single Equipment BOMs, but are necessary for developing Equipment Class BOMs.
Lack of Awareness
While facility operators should be aware of the value of Single Equipment BOMs, they are less likely to know the value of Equipment Class BOMs because it’s a concept that’s principally used in a manufacturing context. Operators need to be aware that developing comprehensive BOMs requires integrated knowledge of and capabilities working with engineering data, mathematics of supply chain, and AI–graph technologies. They don’t need to know how these technologies work in detail, but do need to know how they add value for achieving operational objectives.
Resource Constraints
All companies have resource constraints. This is a key area where AI and graphs can bring significant value since they provide far more for far less than conventional BOM development processes.
The Relevant AI and Graph Technologies for Developing BOMs
AI and graph technologies developed for specific domains and their sub-disciplines can deliver performance that is superior to generic solutions.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is an enabling technology for developing BOMs. OCR can convert scanned, and even handwritten, documents into machine-readable text. This is a prerequisite for the application of all subsequent AI–graph technologies.
That being said, it’s important that you only use OCR where it is needed because all OCR software may introduce errors. For example, OCR software may think a “B” is an “8”, so, it's important to identify pages that are machine readable, and not send them for OCR. This will minimize errors, and save cost and time.
Page Classification
Manually searching through 10,000 page vendor books for cross sectional diagrams with parts lists is no fun. No more. A mix of computer vision and natural language understanding technologies, together with technical document axioms, can split up huge files, review page content, and highlight relevant pages in a fraction of the time. Software for developing BOMs should identify the following engineering pages.
Table Extraction
BOM-relevant data typically resides in tables in pages such as cross-sectional diagrams, parts lists and data sheets. Capturing this information is significantly faster thanks to advancements in table detection and extraction, especially if you need to extract complex tables such as those found in SPIR and data sheets.
Component Reconciliation
We’ve already discussed how Equipment Class BOMs unify Single Equipment BOMs by identifying and linking identical and similar components across an equipment class. This requires a combination of natural language understanding and graph technologies. The original and reconciled terms for a component would be stored in an Equipment Class BOM.
You can import the organized BOM data into asset management software such as a CMMS or EAM for maintenance planning and procurement. You can also integrate BOMs into an Enterprise Knowledge Graph to link asset configuration data to sensor, database, and document data about the corresponding assets.
If remote access to the BOM data is set up using a cloud or other solution, and coupled with collaboration applications on computers and mobile devices, it’s possible for dispersed stakeholders to seamlessly work together.
Developing your BOMs
Developing Single Equipment and Equipment Class BOMs at the assembly level is now faster and cheaper using AI–graph based software. If you decide Single Equipment BOMs are the way to go, your team can use Cekap’s engineer-friendly software to develop them, or you can use us to do it. If, however, you decide to develop Equipment Class BOMs, then your team will need to have a graph engineer or you will need to outsource the development to us. Investing in developing Equipment Class BOMs can unlock significant savings on safety stock, procurement planning and increase ability to deal with unexpected developments in turnarounds and CMs.