The Bill of Materials Management, also known as BOM, is the collection and maintenance of blueprints that are used by a manufacturing company for their products. This is crucial for companies producing highly customized or complex products. This is how the company can understand the millions of possible parts and unit of raw material, product options, and permutations of formulas or other proprietary recipes it has available to satisfy the constantly changing demands of an often highly technical and competitive industry. Because the BOM contains all types of information about products, it’s quite normal for many disciplines to use the data within the Bill Of Materials record (design, engineering, document management and operations), in order to do the right job. Engineers and manufacturers depend so much on BOMs, that they have their own subsets: the manufacturing bill and the engineering bill. BOMs are key to business operations such as parts sourcing and outsourcing. It is therefore important that your BOM is accurate, current, well-organized, and correct. It is particularly important for businesses that contract manufacturing, to have a bill of material. A bill of material management is better for manufacturing. It helps to make sense of the product offerings. Although it sounds simple, in reality, this can require the storage and collection of large amounts of data. In an increasingly collaborative industry, the data must be synthesized and shared with manufacturers partners in order to keep the supply chain in sync with any new products or modifications to BOM specifications. This example shows how cloud-powered SaaS BOM management solutions like this one can improve operational efficiency in several primary ways. They help businesses understand their own product offerings, no matter how complex they are in standard configurations. Or if there is a wide range of customization options that can be used, both technically and service-oriented. It is vital for any manufacturing company to have a single source and one definition of its product offerings. BOM management systems are able to do that. A proper BOM management system is a good way to manage change. It is essential that all changes to the BOM be documented using the approved approval process of your organization. This will ensure the integrity and security of the whole system. This can also pose a risk of liability as confusion in precise manufacturing poses a risk to employees and consumers. Just ask an automobile company who has had an airbag recall due to an incorrectly tested or approved part, or an airline that was investigated by the FAA because it used sub-assemblies that were not properly maintained in an aircraft that crashed. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to handle the large amounts of data required for modern supply chains. This article may interest you: “What Is Supply Chain Management (SCM).”
