MBOM Part 2 on The Future of PLM

The MBOM Fight: EBOM, BOP, Excel, and the Factory Reality PLM Keeps Ignoring The last Future of PLM BOM debate ended without a clean conclusion — which probably means we finally hit the real issue. Everyone talks about the EBOM → MBOM handoff. But manufacturing rarely behaves like a clean downstream consumer of engineering intent. The factory has constraints. The BOP has verbs, not nouns. The BOE defines what can actually be made. MES still lives in Excel more often than anyone wants to admit. And when the shop floor changes reality, engineering often finds out too late — or not at all. So we’re going back in. This follow-up panel asks the harder questions: Is the MBOM a real product structure, or just a workaround for disconnected systems? Who actually owns manufacturing definition: engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, ERP, MES — or nobody? Why do spreadsheets keep surviving every PLM transformation? What happens when manufacturing “redlines” the design — and how fast does that reality flow back upstream? Is the BOP actually more important than the BOM? And in the age of AI agents, product memory, and digital thread architectures, are EBOM/MBOM/SBOM separate structures — or just different views of a deeper product lifecycle graph? Joining me: Brion Carroll Patrick Hillberg, Ph.D. Rob Ferrone Oleg Shilovitsky David Schultz We’ll cover EBOM, MBOM, BOP, BOE, MES, ERP, manufacturing execution, service intent, spreadsheets, liability, and why “throw it over the wall” still refuses to die. This is Part 2 of the BOM debate. Part 1 asked why engineering and manufacturing still struggle to speak the same language. Part 2 asks a sharper question: What if manufacturing reality should drive engineering more than engineering drives manufacturing? Join us live. #PLM #MBOM #EBOM #DigitalThread #Manufacturing #MES #ERP #BOP #EngineeringSoftware #FutureOfPLM #ProductLifecycleManagement