Supplier Parts and Supplier Part Selection

The Part in the KBL represents an identifier for the PDM information of a component in the context of a specific company. Therefore the Part has the mandatory key attributes Part_number and Company_name. The most common case in the KBL is, that the Part within a harness, represents an OEM component specification.

There are cases where this specification can be satisfied by components from different suppliers. The harness manufacturer has a freedom of choice between these components (e.g. for reasons of local availability). However, in the end the choosen alternative shall be documented. This implementation guideline defines how this scenario shall be represented in the KBL.

Basically this scenario is covered by the Alias_identification as it represents "…an additional identifier that is used to identify the object of interest in a different context, either in another Organization, or in some other context.". Therefore, the following applies:

The following attribute mapping shall be used:

Attribute Value - Definition
Alias_id The part number of the component in the “other” context (the supplier part number).
Scope Defines the scope where the part number is defined (the company name of the supplier).
Description The type of the alias id. Despite the misleading naming of the attribute, this is not a human readable description, but the actual type / role of the alias id. For the scenario defined by this implementation guideline, the following values shall be used:
  • supplier number for possible supplier part numbers in the context of the part.
  • selected supplier number for selected supplier part numbers in the context of an occurrence.