The aim of this article is to show how to automate PLM processes – primarily regarding naming and translation of materials in SAP.
Why are part names important?
Part Names (material descriptions) are important in most companies. A good and consistent name lets your employees, suppliers and customers better understand what is “behind” the part number. Furthermore, Part Names are hugely important when it comes to customs: Good translations cut down transit time. An increasing number of our clients spend vast amounts of time and money to translate Part Names. But there is an alternative: Automate the naming of parts!
General Idea
At BoostPLM, we have looked into this issue and have provided a automated solution.
This solutions can name and translate part names by creating naming templates for each Part Class.
Classifying Parts is a old method to search and find Parts. Hence, some companies has an extensive classification system developed internally.
Today however, the trend is to use international standards like UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Product and Services Code) or eClass. This reduce the internal governance of the categories ease the collaboration with partners.
Process
Every Part has a set of attributes specific to its category. As an example, a bolt can be described by its shape, size, length, quality, finish and ISO standard. Therefore, a suitable Part Name for a hexagonal bolt could be:
Many ERP systems have a limited length of the Part Name. For example the “material description” in SAP must be shorter than 40 characters. This often requires to use abbreviations and reduce the number of attributes included in the part name.
We have built a SAP functionality that complies with this demand. Furthermore, we’ve the extended material description without abbreviations and with all attributes are also supported – again fully automated and readily translated.
Below is an example of a template for the 31161620 hexagonal bolt, showing first the short and then the long description:
We use different tags to specify each type of building block in the description template:
[] for attribute value
{} for attribute unit of measurement
Translations
To automate translation, we utilize SAP’s out-of-the-box functionality for handling multi-langue attribute descriptions.
Even better, some alpha-numeric attributes don’t need any translation, e.g. the attribute ‘Standard’ as shown above in the example with the value ‘ISO4014’. This allow us to separate the alpha-numeric attributes into two groups: One group where English is the default, and another where translation into a specific language is mandatory.
Triggering points
The part name is not static so the generation of part names must be started whenever:
- change of a part’s UNSPSC classification
- change of a part’s attribute
- change of translations are
- change of a description template
Implementing the automation
Automating the Part Naming might be a gradual process and to accommodate this, we can introduce an automation level with the following values:
- Fully-Automated
- Semi-Automated
This means that parts designated ‘Semi-automated’ will go through a review process before updates are applied. Changes to the description of ‘Fully-Automated’ Parts will kick off whenever a triggering point is raised.
Fully-automated systems obviously need a few checks and balances and we’ve introduced an application log and a set of possible errors that the system should log. The types of error types added were:
- General update errors on each material (this would typically be object-locking issues due to some users locking the Part already)
- Truncation of the short description – this would be when the template results in a description exceeding 40 characters.
Conclusion
Automating the naming of Parts could be hugely beneficial to any manufacturing company and greatly help with warehousing, selling, procuring and not least with customs.
If you think you could benefit from an upgrade to your Part Naming system, get in touch and let us investigate the options.
