Appeared in: Manufacturing.net
The technology world seems to have ideas that are widely debated from time to time with different viewpoints, but eventually a consensus is reached and the industry and its customers collectively move on. For the past 25 years though one debate still seems to linger in the world of enterprise business software, and that is: What is the role of the bill-of-material in a business’s operations and which system (or process) should “own” its definition? What makes this question so challenging is that the industry even struggles to reach a consensus on the definition of “bill-of-material” (BOM), and without this consensus, determining enterprise ownership of the BOM is endlessly debatable.