Problem Statement

Your enterprise has developed lots of different products which have similarities to a certain extent. After some time, you have sufficient sales data available for the different products so you can do a cross-product analysis by checking for commonalities of the components and pre-assembly units used. The engineers have provided a large number (200+) of bill of materials (part lists) for the various products, each of them listing several thousand parts. You want to identify the commonalities (i.e. same or similar parts used) among the product variants, and weigh them up with the number of products sold, in order to initiate some strategic improvements in the product portfolio in order to optimize operational efficiency and profitability.

The Solution

• Use a simple statement to identify all bill of material files (do not name them individually in your program)
• Load one file after the other and apply relational algebraic operations (e.g. intersections) in order to spot commonalities
• Identify individual parts and similar pre-assembly units used frequently
• Consolidate the information to an abstraction level you can use a a decision base
• Add format, style and save the work.