Global Manufacturing and Consumption

Another significant shift in the manufacturing industry is that product development and production have been widely distributed. It’s not a surprise to find “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China” on the back of an iPod owned by a 16-year-old boy in Spain. Production offshoring and global marketing give companies opportunities to cut costs and to reach more consumers, but these activities also require more collaboration with up- and down-stream partners. Product data transparency between a manufacturer and its suppliers (or in other words, consistent BOM information throughout its supply chain) becomes an important issue when companies want less expensive production resources but still need to keep up with the pace of shortening time-to-market. In an old-fashioned way, an engineering change that reflects material changes may reach suppliers in days. Not to say that suppliers may also have a few layers of suppliers.

Consistent BOM throughout the whole supply chain relies on integration. First of all, internal integration ties all the information systems running within an organization (PDM/PLM, ERP, SCM, etc.) that rely on accurate BOM data. This integration allows companies to have effective and consistent product information any time it is needed. Secondly, external integration connects all parties on the value chain. Based on electronic data interchange (EDI) or other means of data exchange, external integration allows enterprises to have a common view of the product structure and other critical data, so companies can collaborate across organizational borders.

Why Managing BOM Is Such a Big Task

In the discrete manufacturing sector, the bill of materials (BOM) is a fundamental piece of product data that exists throughout the major stages of a product’s life cycle. According to Wikipedia, BOM is the term used to describe the raw materials, parts, subcomponents, and components needed to manufacture a finished product. Simply speaking, BOM is just a list of all materials needed to be assembled together into a product. The concept is clear and simple, and it doesn’t seem to be a difficult task to manage BOM, especially when we have a powerful tool—software—in hand. However, this is true only when the product structure is so simple that not much collaboration is needed to develop the product, when consumers are delighted to have the same products that everyone else has, and when design, engineering, and production are performed under the same roof. The truth is, during the past few decades, the landscape of the manufacturing sector has changed dramatically, and it is still changing at a rapid pace.

Collaborative Product Development

As time moves on, products become not only more complicated in structure, but also impossible to develop exclusively by a single department. In fact, developing a product is now a corporate-wide activity that involves almost every function of a company, from strategic planning, to sales and marketing, to after-sales services.

To see how things get more complicated, we don’t even need to look at all the participants. Let’s stay with three functions—product design, engineering design, and production—for a while. At the time when the product design department finishes its work, a design BOM will be generated. Ideally, this BOM will be carried throughout subsequent processes. However, this is not very likely to happen. For example, a single part created by product design team might be modified into two parts by the engineering design team for the feasibility of production; when the production team receives the production order, it might decide to use another material (which also meets the requirements) to produce the parts, since there is a large amount of this material in the stock due to a cancelled order.

The differences among the design BOM, engineering BOM, and production BOM create inconsistency of product data along the product’s life cycle, and sometimes increase product cost and time-to-market. Besides these three types of BOM, there are also customer BOM, sales BOM, maintenance BOM, cost BOM, etc., all used for different purposes, making things even more complicated. One way to resolve this problem is to bridge the information gaps on a constant basis under the change management mechanism, which is a fundamental functionality within the product lifecycle management (PLM) solution.

Mass Customization

To meet the increasing demands of consumers that want more personalized products without significant increases in price, many manufacturers now practice mass customization of products ranging from automobiles to computers—even apparel. Modular BOM is one of the enablers for mass customization. It defines the components needed to produce a subassembly, and provides cost information for each component and “rolled-up” cost for the overall subassembly. Nowadays, one product may many configurations. If computer systems store each possible configuration as an independent BOM, BOM maintenance becomes almost impossible.

Configurable BOM is another enabler for mass customization. By using this BOM, buyers and manufacturers can create “end-items” dynamically. Based on this configurability, Quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions (sometimes known as configure, price, and quote, or CPQ) enable manufacturers to mobilize their mass customization initiatives. These systems can reduce time-consuming quoting and ordering processes, decrease unit costs, and lower sales costs.

Product Review:Patch Deployment

Once the initial scan is complete, you will probably want to deploy any missing patches or service packs. To do so, go to the Security Scanner container at the top of the user interface and then right click on the computer that you want to update. You will have the option of deploying the patches onto the selected computer or onto all computers. LANguard will send the users a message before the deployment process begins and will stop any necessary services on the user's machines.

Earlier I mentioned that one of the big drawbacks to Microsoft's SUS is that there are a limited number of Microsoft products that it can manage patches for. This is not the case with GFI LANguard though. GFI LANguard can handle patch management for all Microsoft server products, operating systems, and even for Microsoft Office. It even has the ability to deploy patches for non-Microsoft products (although the need for such patches is not automatically detected). Although GFI LANguard is clearly superior to SUS, GFI recommends using GFI LANguard as a compliment to SUS rather than as an alternative to it. In fact, GFI has published a white paper that details the specifics of using SUS and GFI LANguard together. You can read this white paper at www.gfi.com/whitepapers/patch-management.pdf.

Another reason why using GFI LANguard in conjunction to SUS is an ideal patch management solution is because of the timeliness of patch deployment. You probably remember the SQL Slammer virus, which exploited a hole in SQL Server. A patch was available from Microsoft very soon after the virus first appeared and yet millions were affected with the virus because they did not patch SQL quickly enough. GFI LANguard allows you to deploy patches immediately to all of your computers. You also have the option of scheduling both scans and patch deployments. Additionally, you have the option of setting up various types of alerts. That way if a security scan detects a critical vulnerability you can be notified immediately so that you can take action.

Product Review: Security Scanning

GFI LANguard is much more than a patch management product though. Any patch management solution will scan your network for missing patches. GFI LANguard raises the bar by also scanning the network for other types of potential security vulnerabilities.

The nice part about this feature is that you don't have to do any extra work to perform a full-blown security scan against your network. When you scan your network for missing patches, GFI LANguard will also check for things like open shares, open ports, and unused user accounts. The software also checks for security vulnerabilities related to audit policies, password policies, user accounts, groups, and computers.

When the scan is complete, GFI LANguard offers a dozen different reports that you can view. Many of these reports pertain specifically to security vulnerabilities that have been detected. Best of all, reports exist that focus solely on specific types of vulnerabilities. For example, you can choose to look at only the most serious security vulnerabilities, or to look only at vulnerabilities pertaining to your password policies.

Available Patch Management Solutions

There are many patch management tools available from Microsoft and from third party software vendors. Microsoft's two primary patch management solutions are SMS Server and the Software Update Service (SUS). Both are good solutions, but have their limitations. SMS Server is a comprehensive patch management solution, but has a hefty price tag and a steep learning curve. SUS is a free patch management utility that is easy to use, but it has some major limitations. SUS cannot deploy patches related to Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, or Microsoft Office. Furthermore, SUS cannot deploy patches to machines that are running Windows NT.

These various limitations mean that SUS and SMS Server simply aren't good fits for many organizations. As an alternative to these two products, many companies are turning to third party patch management solutions. One particular patch management solution that I really like is GFI's LANguard Network Security Scanner. Although GFI's LANguard has been around for a while, GFI has recently released version 5.

Product Review: GFI's LANguard Network Security Scanner

Without a doubt, one of the most tedious chores that network administrators must routinely perform is patch management. Hardly a week goes by that Microsoft doesn't release some sort of patch. It is the network administrator's responsibility to download the latest patches and apply them to all of the organization's computers. As tedious as patch management is though, it is one chore that really shouldn't be neglected. Not only do the various patches resolve security vulnerabilities, once a patch is released the specific vulnerability addressed by the patch is made public, making the vulnerability much more likely to be exploited on un-patched machines.