Synchronizing a Product Structure or Assembly with a Manufacturing BOM

When you synchronize a product structure or product assembly with a manufacturing BOM, you can transfer the following engineering objects to material BOMs in manufacturing and thus pass on engineering data to manufacturing:

Product variants
Product item variants
Product assembly headers

You can transfer both product variants and product assemblies in one synchronization run to manufacturing.

For more information, see Product Structure and Assembly Management (PLM-WUI-OBJ-PSM).

If you have not yet executed synchronization, the system creates a new manufacturing BOM by copying the data of the product structure or product assembly to the manufacturing BOM. You can perform more synchronizations. The system updates the existing manufacturing BOM:

If you have changed the product structure or product assembly after a synchronization
If you have changed the manufacturing BOM after a synchronization
The system can use change management to manage changes made to the product structure or product assembly and to the manufacturing BOM (see Change Number on the Web UI).

Guided Structure Synchronization also considers change states without change numbers (see Synchronization Planning).

The goal is to transfer the changes made to the product structure or product assembly to the manufacturing BOM to keep both of them synchronized.

Features

The synchronization of a product structure or product assembly with a manufacturing BOM comprises the following functions:

Function	Description
Planning	You plan the synchronization with a synchronization unit (see Synchronization Planning). You define the source structure for synchronization and the target to which it is to be transferred. You can use product structure variants, product item variants, and the product assembly header as source structures.
Synchronization	You start the synchronization in the planning environment by choosing Start Synchronization. During synchronization, the system explodes the source structure and transfers it according to specific rules to a BOM. When the system explodes the source structure, it uses the planning data to determine the starting point (point of entry) for synchronization (see Process Flow in Guided Structure Synchronization). To create non-configurable material BOMs out of configurable product structures during synchronization, see SAP Note 2003782.
Mapping of Source Change Numbers to Target Change Numbers	The system reads all the change numbers of the product structure or product assembly and displays them. You can map the change numbers to target change numbers (see Mapping Source Change Numbers to Target Change Numbers).
Reconciliation and resolving conflicts	The system monitors changes made to engineering BOMs and automatically runs a reconciliation. The system compares the engineering BOM with the manufacturing BOM and displays conflicts and then proposes solutions to the conflicts. You can perform corresponding actions for them (see Reconciliation Workbench).
Managing authorizations	The system manages authorizations by means of access control contexts (see Authorizations and Access Control Context (PLM-WUI-APP-ACC)).