BILL OF MATERIALS

A Bill of Materials [BOM] or Product Structure is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture an end product. These are the Direct Materials for making a specific product and are directly related to its manufacture. A BOM may be used for communication between manufacturing partners or confined to a single manufacturing plant.

A BOM has a ‘parent’ item and one or more ‘child’ items, which are the materials to be worked on to get the finished parent item.

Manufacturing Bill of Materials (MBOM)

A Manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM), also referred to as the Manufacturing BOM, contains all the parts and assemblies required to build a complete and shippable product, including packaging materials, safety and other instructions, and manuals. Even minor items that are used in the assembly process, such as glues, tapes etc.s are also included. Both off-the-shelf (OTS) components and custom, made-to-specification (MTS) parts will be part of a MBOM. Intangible items like software and firmware are also included.

The MBOM is focused on the parts that are needed to manufacture a product. In addition to the parts list in an EBOM, the MBOM also includes information about how the parts relate to each other. In simple terms, the MBOM should include every item that can be found in the final finished good, at some level

Engineering bill of materials (EBOM)

The EBOM is organized with regards to how a product is designed, generally derived from its mechanical CAD model. It may not carry any information about how parts relate to each other. It merely represents the physical product being “engineered”.

Often, EBOM contains items for a single engineering discipline only. Hence, more than one EBOM could exist for the same product, because different engineering departments create their own versions.