What is a "BOM" ?

You just feel with your bones that a proper defined and well finalized "BOM" is like "Heaven".

I'm going to talk about "BOM" :

First of all it stands for "Bill of Material" which defines it pretty well.

It is a "document" that you refer to, a "List" like the one that is given to you to buy in order to cook a delicious meal. The very vital one. No matter it is a modern manufacturing or an old fashion.

And as of any other lists it can contain more or less details "according to the need".

It contains Materials and Quantity of those materials as the most important contents.

From now on I go more in depth …

We have different types of BOM's according to each stages that a process goes through to make the final product all from a sketch.

One type is "Designing BOM" or also called "Engineering BOM" which is the output of parts designing stage which includes raw materials and amount of those raw material to make each part needed for a big module. So the application here, is to manufactur parts from raw materials.

The other one is "Manufacturing BOM" which comes after parts are manufactured according to Design BOM and now it is needed to know which part and in what amount is needed for final product. So the application here is to know what to assemble together?! In order to have a big main assembled product.

another one is "Sales BOM" which contains the big main product in addition to its accessories. like manuals , chargers or cables we get as we buy a new cellphone. Here the application is to know what exactly should be delivered to the final customer as a package.

These are the 3 main types of BOM, and other types of BOM's are also common like Single and multi level BOM's, Configurable or modular and other types.

For now, just remember that the BOM is a "Dynamic Document".

In part 2 we will see contents of a good BOM...