Product Structure: Making it Lean, Infosys Technologies Limited
Leaders at a high tech company are considering upgrading to a newer version of their enterprise resources planning (ERP) application. As part of this initiative, employees are reengineering the company's demand fulfillment process and assessing the opportunity to simplify bill of material (BOM) structure. The current demand fulfillment process is cumbersome, uses single BOM type (MAKE) for product ID, and configuration product ID (ATO Model) for entire fulfillment except spares. There is a single inflexible demand fulfillment process and BOM structure, which causes duplicate transactions in order fulfillment and longer product lead times. This case study evaluates possible options and recommends the optimum solution to make the system leaner.