Custom builds as a versioned bill of materials

Most shops do not need PLM. If your custom work is a few dream builds a year, a project in Projects and a spreadsheet will do. But some shops build bikes as a core part of the business: a house gravel build offered in five sizes, a frame builder's workshop, a shop that assembles a dozen custom road bikes a month. For them, each build is a product, and a spreadsheet stops being enough the first time a distributor discontinues a crankset halfway through a batch.

PLM treats the bike as a structure. The top line is the build. Under it sit the frame, the fork, the wheelset, the groupset and the cockpit. Under the groupset sit the shifters, derailleurs, crankset, cassette, chain and brakes. Each line has a quantity and a find number, and each part has a record of its own, with a part number, a classification and a revision history.

The PLM module was built for manufacturing teams, and it carries more than a shop will use. The parts that matter for custom builds are the structures, the variants, the rollups and the change history.

Every custom build shop has a list of things that do not go together. A 12-speed chain on an 11-speed cassette. A flat-mount caliper on a post-mount frame. A 44mm head tube and a straight-steerer fork without the right headset. That list usually lives in the heads of the two people who have been building longest.

PLM's variants let you write those rules down. An option set is a choice the rider makes, such as frame size, drivetrain or wheel size. A rule says that choosing one option requires another, or excludes it, with a sentence explaining why. The configurator runs the rules against a combination and tells you whether it is buildable and which rule is in the way, so a junior mechanic spec-ing a build gets the same answer the senior one would give.

Sizing works the same way. The frame comes in sizes, and some components change with it: stem length, bar width, crank length, seatpost. Make them options, write the rules, and the structure for a size 54 differs from the one for a 58 only where it should.

Today, it does not connect directly. PLM is a separate module in the suite. At present it asks for its own sign-in rather than using the suite hand-off the other modules use. A build structure in PLM is not linked to a Service work order, and Service has no parts inventory for PLM parts to match.

Half of that link now exists: work orders are live in Service as numbered jobs with line items. The other half is not. Parts inventory and purchase orders are planned for a later phase of the Service build. When they exist, the natural connection is a build BOM in PLM feeding the parts list of a build work order. That is a direction, not a commitment with a date.

What you can do today is keep the build itself in PLM, the schedule and people in Projects, the conversation in Chat, and the final safety inspection in a Service checklist, which is live. A rider picking up a custom build should get the same signed inspection PDF as any other bike.