🎨 Color BOM at scale
In today’s market, product personalization is no longer a trend – it’s an expectation. Whether it’s consumer electronics, packaged goods, or industrial equipment, customers want products that reflect their unique style and preferences. For manufacturers, this means managing a growing array of color and appearance options without compromising speed to market or increasing engineering complexity.
Efficiently managing a product’s color BOM is critical to success.
🎨 Introducing Teamcenter BOM Color Management
Color BOM management is new in Teamcenter, offering color library capabilities designed specifically for BOM management. This enables manufacturers to:
- Efficiently manage color and appearance variability across product portfolios.
- Define and automate color variants using model-based rules for color, texture, and gloss.
- Decouple color planning from design geometry, allowing appearance specialists and designers to collaborate seamlessly.
By centralizing approved color specifications, the color library supports change management and review workflows—leading to faster approvals, fewer errors, and a more agile response to evolving market trends.
Here’s a quick example using a consumer coffee machine to show how color library in Teamcenter enable rapid creation of color themes and color variants.
⚙️ Bridging CAD simplicity and engineering complexity
One of the biggest challenges in managing product appearance lies in the disconnect between design and engineering workflows.
- CAD Designers typically prefer working with generic or “less-finish” parts, focusing on geometry, fit, and function. Managing dozens of part variants just to represent color options adds unnecessary overhead. Their goal is to develop one master part and leave appearance details for later stages.
- Engineering and Manufacturing Teams, on the other hand, require precise information about every product configuration—including color. Color impacts variability planning, manufacturing release, supply chain logistics, and compliance. To ensure completeness, engineering must convert generic CAD parts into multiple color-specific variants.
Traditionally, this meant manually creating and maintaining separate CAD files or BOM entries for each color, leading to duplication, increased maintenance, and a higher risk of errors.
🔄 The solution: color explosion
In Teamcenter Color BOM Management, the color explosion capability automates the generation of all required color variants from a single “less-finish” part. Instead of manually creating and tracking multiple iterations, Teamcenter can automatically “explode” the generic part into all necessary color configurations for downstream processes. Color explosion is rules-based and governed within the BOM, ensuring consistency while maintaining flexibility.
This ensures:
- Design simplicity: CAD designers work with one master part.
- Engineering completeness: All color variants are available for planning, manufacturing, and release.
- Efficiency: Eliminates manual duplication and reduces errors.
- Configurability: Supports full variability management without burdening design teams.
🚀 Delivering personalization at scale
As demand for personalized products continues to grow, scalable and efficient color management becomes critical for success. Teamcenter BOM Color Management provides the foundation to bridge the gap between design simplicity and engineering complexity.
By combining centralized color definitions with automation, manufacturers can respond more quickly to increasing product variability, improve accuracy across downstream processes, and reduce operational overhead. Personalization becomes not a burden, but a competitive advantage.
đź“– Complete guide to PLM
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