In most industrial groups, product data and the Bill of Materials stay fragmented, siloed, hard to reach for the people who need them every day. It isn't a tooling problem: it's a continuity problem.
What it actually costs
- +Suboptimal purchasing negotiations. Without cross-visibility on components and suppliers, you can't consolidate volume: you negotiate reference by reference.
- +Broken traceability. Tracking a product's technical changes and versions becomes detective work, not a lookup.
- +Cascading modifications. Every change triggers a chain of revisions, delaying production.
- +Untapped product data. The BoM stays a technical deliverable instead of becoming a decision-making lever.
The hidden costs of a fragmented BoM
PLM, ERP, MES, Excel: each system holds a piece of the truth, none holds the connection. Digital continuity breaks at every tool boundary, and it's that break, not the data volume, that blocks the cross-functional view.
60% of data teams' time goes into preparing data that nobody guarantees the reliability of.
The impact, function by function
Why current approaches no longer cut it
ERPs and PLMs, even integrated, share a structural limit: they're built to manage records, not relationships. The myth of a single IT-owned tool hits the same wall, and workarounds (Excel, custom development) are paid for in technical debt.
The BoM is a graph, not a table
A nomenclature isn't a list of rows: it's a network of business relationships. A component belongs to an assembly, comes from a supplier, exists in several versions, equips several products. Modeled that way, on a shared business ontology, it becomes a single source of truth that delivers three things at once:
- +a reliable, shared view of product data;
- +real autonomy for operational teams, without going through IT for every question;
- +immediate, scalable use, including by an AI that has to return traceable answers.
Product complexity isn't going to decrease. Silos, on the other hand, already cost millions on the most documented and least exploited piece of data in industry.