What-If Analysis and Scenarios (Epic)

Feature Request: What-If BOM Analysis and Scenario Comparison

Summary:
Introduce advanced what-if analysis capabilities for Bills of Material (BOMs) by enabling users to create, version, and compare multiple BOM scenarios. Users should be able to systematically replace part numbers and substructures within a BOM to explore alternatives, assess impacts, and support data-driven decision-making.

Problem Statement:
Today, users have limited support for structured what-if analysis on BOMs. Evaluating alternative materials, part substitutions, or substructure changes often requires manual duplication and ad-hoc edits to BOMs, which is time-consuming and error-prone. There is no straightforward way to maintain multiple scenarios side-by-side, compare differences, or quickly understand the impact of changes across complex BOMs. This makes it difficult to evaluate tradeoffs (cost, availability, performance, risk) and slows down decision-making.

Proposed Solution:
Enable a dedicated what-if and scenario management capability for BOMs with the following behaviors:

• Allow users to create versioned BOM scenarios derived from a baseline BOM (e.g., “Scenario A – Alternate Material,” “Scenario B – Cost Reduction”).

• Provide tools to systematically replace part numbers and substructures across a BOM or selected portions of a BOM.

• Support side-by-side comparison of BOM scenarios, highlighting changes such as added/removed parts, substituted materials, and quantity or structure differences.

• Track the relationship between each scenario and its baseline, so users can understand the origin and scope of changes.

• Optionally include guardrails or permissions to prevent accidental overwriting of the baseline BOM when experimenting with scenarios.

• Offer clear visualization and reporting on key impacts (e.g., cost, quantity changes, material changes) between scenarios where underlying data is available.

Benefits:

• Enables faster, more reliable what-if analysis for engineering, sourcing, and planning teams.

• Improves decision quality by making it easy to compare alternative BOM configurations side-by-side.

• Reduces manual duplication and editing of BOMs, lowering the risk of errors and inconsistencies.

• Supports more agile responses to material shortages, cost pressures, and design changes by making substitutions and structural changes easier to evaluate.

• Provides a structured framework for scenario planning, increasing transparency and traceability of BOM decisions.