Patent ID: 7146234

Claim:
A method of automatically modeling a relationship between a configurable product and a plurality of components of the configurable product as a bill of materials, wherein the configurable product and the plurality of components are related to one another by a plurality of selection conditions, the method comprising: generating a planning profile table for the configurable product, wherein the planning profile table includes data relating to the configurable product and at least one of a primary planning profile table and a secondary profile planning table; generating a plurality of characteristic value combinations representing the plurality of selection conditions; modeling the bill of materials using the planning profile table and the plurality of characteristic value combinations; and using the modeled bill of material to control a supply of the product; wherein generating the planning profile table comprises: generating the primary profile planning table for the configurable product, and generating the secondary profile planning table for an assembled component of the configurable product including a header characteristic identifying the configurable product of which the assembled component is a component and data relating to the assembled component, and wherein the method further comprises processing the data in the primary profile planning table and the secondary profile planning table to generate a demand plan taking into account the assembled component.