What Is Bill of Materials (BOM) Management?
Imagine stepping into a manufacturing plant where every component, material, and process is perfectly aligned to produce a product with precision and efficiency. This is the power of BOM (Bill of Materials), a fundamental concept in the manufacturing industry that structures the items and materials needed to fulfill a product’s purpose.
In this blog post, we will explore the importance of BOM in manufacturing, break down the different types of BOMs, and discuss the challenges organizations face in managing them. We’ll also dive into how Nora IPLM can help streamline BOM management, maintaining accuracy, synchronization, and efficiency across departments and systems.
Multiple BOMs in an Organization
Contrary to the common perception that BOMs are solely used for manufacturing, especially by business units utilizing MRP/ERP systems, BOMs play a broader role. They are involved in various business activities before and after the manufacturing phase. In reality, there is no single BOM in an organization; instead, multiple BOMs manage different materials and structures to serve the unit’s purpose.
Some of the widely used BOM types include:
- EBOM (Engineering BOM)
- MBOM (Manufacturing BOM)
- PBOM (Production BOM)
- SBOM (Service BOM)
Additionally, there are more specialized BOMs like Costing BOM and Purchasing BOM. Other related structures include BOP (Bill of Process) and BOR (Bill of Resources), which, while not typical BOMs, define the overall manufacturing process alongside MBOM.
From a data management perspective, a global or enterprise BOM is crucial. It gathers multi-disciplinary definitions under one structure to ensure better integrity of complex products.
Synchronizing BOMs
When multiple BOMs exist for the same product, synchronization is critical. BOMs with incorrect information, outdated revisions, or out-of-sync structures can lead to costly problems. Examples include:
- Supplying incorrect materials to production lines in JIT/JIS environments.
- Sending outdated design data to mold suppliers.
- Missing long-lead items due to incomplete information.
- Incorrect cost calculations resulting in financial losses.
Change Management and BOMs
Change Management is essential for maintaining multiple BOMs in sync. Without a unified Change Management platform, it is challenging to keep BOMs integrated and trustworthy. Key aspects include:
- Conducting impact analyses during change requests.
- Maintaining a chain of changes in downstream units.
- Ensuring controlled implementation.
Even with existing change management processes, managing them in a single environment is crucial to avoid issues. A single dashboard for tracking ongoing changes and implementations is vital for success.
Read more about Nora IPLM’s Change Management capabilities: Read now
Configurable BOMs (150% BOM)
As companies aim to deliver more configurable and customizable products, static (100%) BOMs are insufficient. A configurable BOM is flexible, including all product variants and configurable items. It also tracks material history, such as revisions or replacements.
Using static BOMs for 100 product configurations would require maintaining numerous separate items, leading to complex relations. In contrast, a configurable BOM uses a single superstructure with changing effectivities and rules per configuration.
Understanding Different Bill of Materials (BOM) Views
Optimizing how your BOM data is viewed is crucial for efficient product development, manufacturing, and supply chain management.
Here are the essential views of a BOM and their primary applications:
- Flat View: This is a straightforward, single-level list of all components and their quantities needed to build a product.
- Primary Use: Ideal for planning and procurement, as it provides a quick summary of total material requirements for purchasing.
- Where Used (Reverse) View: Instead of breaking down a product, this view shows the inverse. It starts with a specific component and lists all the higher-level assemblies or final products in which that component is utilized.
- Primary Use: Highly valuable for analyzing material usage across multiple products, managing component obsolescence, and assessing the impact of a part change or recall.
- Consolidated vs Multi-instance: These views focus on how quantities of shared components are presented.
- Consolidated: Combines all instances of a particular part into a single line item with a total quantity.
- Primary Use: Favored by procurement for aggregating total material needs to secure bulk discounts or manage inventory.
- Multi-Instance: Lists each occurrence of a part separately, even if it’s the same component used in different sub-assemblies.
- Primary Use: Essential for design and engineering teams to understand the specific placement and context of each part within the product structure.
- Consolidated: Combines all instances of a particular part into a single line item with a total quantity.
- Phantom: Phantom assemblies are logical groupings of materials that are “virtually” assembled but don’t exist as a physical sub-assembly until they are integrated into a higher-level assembly.
- Primary Use: Some departments, particularly manufacturing and production planning, use phantom levels for organizational purposes. Others, like financial or inventory management, may prefer these levels to be consolidated into the parent BOM for simpler tracking.
- Primary Use: Some departments, particularly manufacturing and production planning, use phantom levels for organizational purposes. Others, like financial or inventory management, may prefer these levels to be consolidated into the parent BOM for simpler tracking.
- Diagram View: This offers a visual, often graphical, representation of a product’s entire structure. Unlike flat lists, it uses nodes and connecting lines to clearly show hierarchical relationships between the final product, its sub-assemblies, and individual components.
- Primary Use:
- Clarity for Complex Products: Makes intricate assemblies easy to understand at a glance.
- Understanding Dependencies: Clearly shows how changes to one part affect others in the assembly.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Serves as an excellent communication tool across various departments (e.g., engineering, manufacturing, sales) due to its intuitive visual nature.
- Error Reduction: Helps visually identify structural errors in the BOM before production begins.
- Primary Use:
Managing BOMs in Organizations
Unfortunately, many organizations still rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage BOMs. This approach is problematic as it leads to data silos, making it difficult to maintain synchronization and leverage data for analytics and integration.
BOMs consist of dynamic data that evolve with changes such as material revisions or replacements. This necessitates robust revision management, baselining, and comparison capabilities.
Organizations with design and engineering departments often mistakenly equate CAD application data with their BOM. However, CAD BOMs are specific to design needs and may include unnecessary items. Exporting this data directly for manufacturing or purchasing in ERP systems is not advisable.
Collaboration around BOMs is essential, especially for large, mobile, and multi-site organizations. This collaboration should extend to third-party suppliers involved in product development and manufacturing.
Integrating BOMs with ERPs
Although BOM-related work occurs before integrating with ERP systems, MBOM is typically the right BOM for integration due to its appropriate structure and information.
In modern organizations, PLMs manage BOMs and automate integration with ERPs after final approvals in the change process. Any subsequent BOM changes in the PLM system should be automatically reflected in the ERP to ensure integrity between the two environments.
Discover How Nora IPLM Transforms BOM Management
Nora IPLM makes BOM management faster, smarter, and more connected, helping teams maintain accuracy and stay aligned from design to production.
Advanced BOM Management
Create, track, and update multi-level Bills of Materials with full control and visibility across every change.
Dynamic Workflows
Automate repetitive steps and approvals so teams can focus on engineering and innovation instead of manual coordination.
Real-Time Analytics
Access live product and component data to make quicker, data-driven decisions and prevent costly mistakes.
By centralizing BOM data, Nora IPLM connects design, engineering, and manufacturing teams in one platform, reducing errors, eliminating silos, and improving collaboration across the entire product lifecycle.
Ready to simplify and scale your BOM management?
Explore how Nora IPLM streamlines every step of your process today.
Explore More from Nora IPLM
Discover more ways Nora IPLM simplifies product development and innovation. Explore related topics, use cases, and platform features that help your teams work smarter and bring better products to market faster.
Advanced BOM Management Module
Enhance your engineering efficiency with Nora IPLM’s Bill of Materials (BOM) Management tools.
Product Lifecycle Management
Efficiently manage, collaborate, and innovate across every stage of your product lifecycle.
Revolutionizing BOM Management
Explore the use case to see how Nora IPLM’s BOM Management helps you take full control of your product data.
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