This is a billion dollar problem.
As somebody not at all familiar with the space -- why?
People are now using airtable to do it
Doing anything with SAP at scale is insanely expensive, and it's hard not to conclude it's by design in the sense of misaligned incentives.
I have no idea what anybody's talking about. I need that Reddit bot which explains the acronyms in a thread.
Some of these acronyms are quite old, but continue to be used as they make sense to the people in those spaces.
From my perspective and experience, the actual reality of manufacturing anything complex does not match up with the set of rules that has to constrain any given ERP platform to be a useful, data-based record. Allow too much freeform data, and start losing more and more analysis ability. Too strict, and you quickly crash against the fuzziness of reality.
All the while requiring that your data be as close to 100% accurate as possible. That's the crux of the problem. Modern, complex engineering/manufacturing requires a level of traceability that cannot be handwaved away.
Now contend with this problem against a bill of materials tens of thousands of lines long with nearly a million discrete items put in, all with their necessary interdependecies recorded.
Now do this across an entire product line.
https://michelbaudin.com/2018/08/01/the-bom-rap/#more-126364...
^ A good read on the complexity of BOMs and why managing them can be tricky.
My hypothesis is that this is because manufacturing is currently modeled as a list of deterministic steps in a table instead of as a stochastic set of nodes and edges.
If anyone would like to work on this problem, please reach out. Here's our (WIP) repo:
YES. Someone else who understands!
I will take a look, as very few people (even experienced manufacturing engineers of the highest pedigree and skill) seem to grasp this intuition.
Here's my super basic attempt at an explanation: https://gist.github.com/barbinbrad/11c651fbf412ec00506fce153...