Why BOM Reporting Still Frustrates Users in 3DEXPERIENCE: A Hard Look Beyond UI Upgrades

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✍️ Introduction

I’ve worked hands-on with 3DEXPERIENCE PLM for years—configuring, customizing, and living through upgrades. Each new version promises smarter UI, better workflows, and improved performance. Yet, some fundamental user pain points just won’t go away.

In this post, I’m unpacking one such issue: Why generating a full EBOM report still frustrates users, despite all the tech advances. We'll look at real challenges, explore what Dassault Systèmes improved, and question whether those improvements solve what actually matters. If your engineers still prefer Excel over widgets, you’ll see why this post hits home.

🚩 The Claim vs. The Ground Reality

Each new 3DEXPERIENCE version promises a better UI, smarter workflows, and smoother change management. On paper, these versions solve a lot: improved role-based access, web widgets, traceability, integration with ERP, and more.

But what happens on the ground, in real PLM implementations?

Even after upgrading to newer versions, our organization still uses classic 3DSpace—not because we want to, but because the real issues haven't been solved meaningfully. Especially around BOM reporting performance, engineers still feel stuck.

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💥 The Real Challenge: EBOM Reporting Performance

Our EBOM structures are deep—sometimes 5–7 levels or more. When a user wants to view the full BOM:

• The report times out or is painfully slow.

• The out-of-the-box behavior prefers one-level-at-a-time expansion for optimal performance, which becomes frustrating when users expect full EBOM views instantly.

• Power users and light users both suffer performance lag.

The idea of real-time, full BOM visualization sounds great—until users try to use it in production. That’s when frustration begins.

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🔁 The Business Reality: Excel Still Wins

Even though we have widget-based dashboards and filters:

• Users prefer Excel for BOM views, multi-level analysis, and offline sharing.

• Tech teams have created scripts to mass-extract data and publish reports externally.

• Shared drives and file exports still rule when it comes to consumption by non 3DExperience users.

It’s a workaround world, even with modern tools in place.

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🧠 Option We Explored: Snapshot-Based Reporting Widgets

To counter the live performance issues, we explored snapshot-based reports that flatten multi-level BOMs during promotion events (e.g., Change Action completion). These snapshots can then power:

• View-only widgets

• Live dashboards for downstream teams

• ERP-compatible exports

✅ Benefits:

• Fast access to deep BOMs—no live load every time

• Enables non-3DExperience users to view product data without logging in

• Helps decouple performance concerns from PLM server load

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⚠️ The Caveat: Snapshots Aren’t Always Safe

Our biggest challenge? Wrong reports generated when snapshot logic misses change events.

This happens because:

• Child objects are revised and promoted independently.

• Event-based capture misses updates if logic isn’t airtight.

• You may serve stale or incorrect BOMs unless all event handlers are synchronized.

So while snapshots solve the performance issue, they sacrifice real-time accuracy unless very well designed.

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🎯 So, Why Is This Still a Problem?

Despite Dassault Systèmes' UI improvements and widget design, this problem persists because:

• Performance optimization for multi-level BOM views may not be the top priority in product roadmap

• Real-world BOM structures are too complex and dynamic

• Companies customize 3DEXPERIENCE differently, so no one-size-fits-all fix exists

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🧭 Takeaway for PLM Teams

If you're dealing with:

• Deep BOM structures

• Performance bottlenecks

• User reliance on Excel

You’re not alone. We’ve seen that UI upgrades don’t necessarily mean user satisfaction. Instead of jumping on shiny dashboards, it’s worth asking:

“What will users actually adopt—and how do we ensure it works fast, accurately, and reliably?”

Snapshots, if implemented with bulletproof event capture, may help. But without real-time guarantees, transparency and trust in the system may still suffer.

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🔄 What’s Next?

At this point, I don’t have a fixed roadmap or a list of next steps. This post captures a real challenge we face in our 3DEXPERIENCE PLM implementation — one that surfaced through day-to-day conversations and frustrations from users on the ground.

As I continue working with the platform and come across new limitations, workarounds, or improvements worth sharing, I’ll document them. This space is less about polished solutions and more about unpacking real scenarios with technical honesty.

If you're on a similar journey, feel free to connect or share how you're tackling these kinds of issues.