About Parts

Enterprise Parts are host company parts that are assembled to represent the bill of materials (BOM) of a product.

An enterprise part BOM could originate from Engineering BOM Management or from a third party PDM system. Using plant-specific parts, an enterprise part BOM could also represent a manufactured MBOM configuration of a product for a host company plant.

When originating from Engineering BOM Management, the enterprise part BOM consists of Engineering BOM Management parts assembled in an EBOM. When representing a plant-specific MBOM, the enterprise part BOM consists of Materials Compliance Management plant-specific parts and standard enterprise parts assembled in a EBOM.

When an enterprise part represents an end item product sold to a customer, the host company may also need to track customer-specific attributes of the part such as customer part number, customer revision level, and so on. Materials Compliance Management provides an object called the Customer Part Number to hold this information. Any number of Customer Part Number objects can be created and connected to an enterprise part for different customer and customer program combinations. The set of Customer Part Number objects connected to an enterprise part is collectively referred to as the customer equivalents.

The enterprise part BOM is sometimes referred to as the "make" equivalent of the part, meaning that it represents how a product, subassembly, or component is made by the host company. Materials Compliance Management also takes into account the Approved Manufacturer List (AML) of an enterprise part, which is the set of manufacturer equivalent parts (MEPs) associated with the enterprise part. Each MEP represents a "buy" equivalent of a part from a particular supplier. If an enterprise part has MEPs associated with it as well as an enterprise part EBOM, this enterprise part has both "make" and "buy" equivalents.

As part of the reporting process, Materials Compliance Management may require that a particular configuration of a product be selected for reporting. This means that for every part that has multiple "make" or "buy" equivalents, one of the equivalents has to be the Selected Equivalent for reporting. Your Business Administrator can configure Materials Compliance Management which method to use o automatically choose the selected equivalent for each part. For example, the selected equivalent can be selected to be the worst case equivalent based on a particular value of compliance. You can override this method individual enterprise parts.

A reported part can have a BOM associated with it consisting of other reported parts connected to each other in an EBOM. This EBOM is imported into Materials Compliance Management through a supplier submission using a reporting tool like Compliance Connect, IMDS, or IPC 1752 and associated with a material declaration that in turn is associated with a manufacturer equivalent part.

A manufacturer equivalent part (MEP) can have a BOM associated with it consisting of subtier parts connected to the MEP in an EBOM. This eBOM is created as a result of copying the reported part EBOM from the material declaration to the MEP when the material declaration is accepted. For more information see Material Declarations.

Plant-specific parts are special versions of enterprise parts that are specific to a host company location.

Plant-specific parts are created from a standard enterprise part and inherit many of the attributes of the standard enterprise part it is created from (the parent). An additional attribute called Plant, which is a host company location, uniquely identifies a plant-specific enterprise part from a standard enterprise part.

Plant-specific parts inherit the AML (the equivalent MEPs) of the parent enterprise part. However, a plant-specific part can have a different selected equivalent than the parent enterprise part.

Plant-specific parts do not inherit the Customer Part Numbers of the parent enterprise part. New Customer Part Numbers must be defined and associated with plant-specific parts.

Plant-specific parts can be connected to other plant-specific parts (of the same location) or to standard enterprise parts with the EBOM relationship. When a plant-specific part references a plant-specific component in a EBOM, this means that both the parent and the component are plant-specific. However, if a plant-specific part references a standard enterprise part, this means this component of the plant-specific BOM (which could in fact be a subassembly) is not plant-specific.

A Manufacturer Equivalent Part (MEP) is a part supplied by a manufacturer to the host company.

An enterprise part can reference any number of MEPs which collectively are referred to the equivalents of the enterprise part. A plant-specific enterprise part inherits the MEP equivalents of its parent enterprise part. An MEP can be associated with a particular supplier or a particular location of a supplier.

For more information about MEPs, see Manufacturer Equivalent Parts.

A supplied part (previously called subtier part) is a component part of an MEP. It is created when a reported part consists of a BOM.

Each component reported part in the BOM is copied to a supplier part when a material declaration is accepted and the reported part structure of the material declaration is copied to the MEP.

Reported parts are created under material declarations to reflect a supplier's declaration of compliance, BOM structure, and material composition of a manufacturer equivalent part.

Reported parts and their EBOMs are read-only representations of the supplier submitted data. For more information, see Material Declarations.

The Customer Part Number object holds customer-specific attributes such as customer part number and customer revision level of a particular enterprise part.

A Customer Part Number can be associated with a particular customer or to a particular customer program. For example, a program could represent a new model of a product that is under development.

Customer Part Number objects can be related to any enterprise part including plant-specific parts. The set of Customer Part Numbers associated with an enterprise part are collectively referred to as the customer equivalents.