The Role of BOM In Production And Manufacturing

The Bill of Materials or BOM is of foremost importance in product manufacturing. It serves as a vital component of the supply chain which ascertains the path as to which a business is headed. To put this into terms, the BOM or the product structure as they call it, is a list of all the raw materials needed to run the manufacturing process. In this context, it can be defined as a list of all the items, components or entities needed to build a particular product. BOM is perhaps the most fundamental part of the supply chain which begins even before the procurement of raw materials takes place.  

At its core, it is a multi-level document including build data for various sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, components, subcomponents and other entities required to build a shippable product. Each entity mentioned in BOM has a unique product name and description. It also includes some other items like Made-to-specification (MTS) parts, Off-the-shell (OTS) components as well as some non-tangible entities such as the firmwares.   

Importance of BOM In Manufacturing

Generating the Bill of materials of BOM is the first step toward designing a healthy shippable product to leverage the maximum benefits out of the available resources. The success of a production business relies on the underlying structure of its designed products. If your product is good and it matches the expectations of the consumers, then definitely the demand for your product will rise up in the market which would eventually lead to greater profits and a good reputation as a brand.

Also read When Your Business Calls For An ERP Solution.

BOM has a great importance in manufacturing process. It helps you make important decisions which further aids in running a smooth business with minimal complexities. The Bill of materials or BOM is often called the list of ingredients or more importantly the recipe which helps in accomplishing all the production related tasks.  

For this reason, it is always recommended to have an effective product structure as it can be a major business driver for you. A solid BOM calls for a healthy business and that’s why it serves as an indispensable part of manufacturing process which must be handled with extreme care and sagacity.      

Will It Be A Part of An ERP System?

Now the question worth asking is that whether you should use it as a part of your existing ERP system or not? While ERP provides turn-key solutions to most of the manufacturing and supply chain processes, using it to monitor the constantly changing BOMs might give you disastrous results instead of doing any benefit. However, many companies have been using ERP for managing their BOMs and some have even claimed that it has actually been quite lucrative for them. But more or less, doing that might cause you more harm than benefit.

This is because the ERP systems are not built for controlling the engineering change processes that generally happen in case of BOMs. So instead of using ERP systems for managing BOMs, we have a whole different fleet of software modules that are perhaps more capable of keeping BOMs under the hook and make a judicious use of them to attain greater benefits. The systems are called BOM Management Systems that are exclusively built for managing BOMs despite of all the engineering changes happening within. Some leading providers of BOM management systems are Arena Corp, Open BOM, Mastercontrol and Open Taps.