Products change constantly as they pass through the product life cycle. The part structure for a product is used to capture all versions of all parts that were ever included in the product. Filters are used to reveal important configurations that have been built in the past, are currently being built, or will be built in the future.

Before the existence of PLM software, manufacturing companies generated bill of material (BOM) reports to capture important product configurations. BOM reports were generated on paper or viewed in specialized software applications specifically written to manage BOMs. These static documents rapidly became outdated.

Although the dynamic, filterable part structure available in Windchill is superior to a static report for most purposes, there are still occasions where a report is useful. Windchill provides software tools to extract and format reports including customized BOM reports.

For more information, see Authoring Reports.

Windchill also provides a list of the most common and useful reports as examples. Standard Windchill reports fall into two categories: