Hi ,

I have question. The company I work for raise concessions which can last up to a 1 years, in some cases even longer.

The reason for this is due to the system we use called Pegasus. This system stores our Bill of Materials (BOMs). When we find that we need to change a single component in a BOM we have to open each BOM save it to our system and make the change, then save it back to Pegasus. In Some cases the change could affect between 1 to 50 BOMs. Due to work loads they have thought of a way to get around this by raising a concession untill the BOM or BOMs are updated.

Can anyone advise on a better system. Has anyone had any experiance with Pegasus / BOMS.

Hi ,

I have question. The company I work for raise concessions which can last up to a 1 years, in some cases even longer.

The reason for this is due to the system we use called Pegasus. This system stores our Bill of Materials (BOMs). When we find that we need to change a single component in a BOM we have to open each BOM save it to our system and make the change, then save it back to Pegasus. In Some cases the change could affect between 1 to 50 BOMs. Due to work loads they have thought of a way to get around this by raising a concession untill the BOM or BOMs are updated.

Can anyone advise on a better system. Has anyone had any experiance with Pegasus / BOMS.FWIW:
Even back in the "olden" days (before computers - even "big iron" like IBM and Univac), many organizations were loathe to make new drawings and new bills of materials when there was a relatively minor revision. Minor revisions were things like adding approved suppliers for special materials or allowing substitutions of "generic" components for brand name ones. So they would just circulate a "concession note" - meaning it was not an actual "change" to a design, merely an acknowledgement that some compatible materials or components had become available which were often easier to obtain and very likely less expensive. They didn't want suppliers to discard materials or components they might already have in stock nor disrupt esablished suppy chains. As late as 1995, I came across such a concession in a customer's contract which dated back to 1980 and was still in force!

This situation is, of course, exactly the kind of circumstance where mistakes and delays can occur because the "concession" sometimes gets lost in a morass of paperwork. Such incidents were part of the reason the aerospace industry became such big proponents of Configuration Management when the errors and omissions started to cost serious money and sometimes crippled entire production lines as suppliers, unaware of the concessions, struggled to obtain the original listed material or component.

The point you make In Some cases the change could affect between 1 to 50 BOMs. is a good example of the cascading effect of small changes such as the one I delineate in this post about Configuration Management (http://elsmar.com/Forums/showpost.php?p=224683&postcount=2)

In terms of your software - there are often code writers at the software companies who will write a neat little macro which will automatically update all Associated Documents. The legacy documents and the Associated Documents, of course, can only be updated if the software can find them in the database. The easiest way for finding the legacy documents in the database is by attaching little "metatags" which identify them as being an Associated Document. In the "olden" days, this was a horrendous task performed with numerous sets of cross-index cards. With modern computers - it's done in a fraction of a second - the catch is the extra time in attaching the metatags (still simpler and quicker than writing or typing index cards!)