A good, well specified bill of materials (BOM) is essential to make sure your product gets built and assembled exactly like you want; conversely, an incomplete or error-prone bill of materials is the source of innumerable errors that can cost you plenty. Having a complete, correct BOM is, as a result, really important at all stages in your product development process. We see frequently that it all starts with having a good engineering bill of materials (EBOM).

This post is part of a series on bill of materials (BOM) basics. This talks about the common consequences of having an incorrect BOM in engineering and manufacturing. For an introduction to bill of materials, the BOM acronym in manufacturing or BOM meaning in manufacturing, please see our blog post "What is a BOM".

The BOM drives manufacturing

The devices we love or enjoy using every day, like the cars we drive, are all made up of parts. To build these devices, engineers and other members of a product development and manufacturing team need to figure out where those parts are coming from. This information may be represented in the engineering bill of materials (EBOM) or as part of the manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM); the most important thing is to make sure the information is correct. If your BOM is incorrect, there are many things that can go wrong when ordering parts or assembling the final product.

In this post, we get back to basics. We'll cover what a BOM is and talk a bit about what BOM means in engineering and manufacturing. We assume that readers have very little prior knowledge about BOMs, but some familiarity with engineering and manufacturing.

Hey y'all. We have a bit of company news to share:

We are ecstatic to announce that we have been accepted into the TinySeed Accelerator Spring 2022 Batch alongside several other amazing companies! You should absolutely go check them out (we're announced at ~10:15, but seriously, check them all out).

There are two things that really get us going here at Bommer: simple improvements that make a big impact, and puns. Lucky for you, dear reader, we're pretty good at both. It's part of our makeup; how we're assembled; welded to our core being; stamped and folded up like...well, you get the idea. The point is, we love to make our users days easier, and we have fun while we do it.

🎶

You have...a drawing

And it...still...needs something

A list of parts would really make your day

But you want it...your way

You want..a table

With all..your data

Believe me when I say

Bommer now builds tables, your way

Tell me why...

🎶

The recent updates to Fusion 360 have been full to the brim with new features and time saving improvements. Sometimes, they make an improvement that we think can really make an impact for Bommer users, and we get so happy that we just have to talk about it. Sorry, not sorry.

Updated: Dec 9, 2020

The latest version of Fusion adds a feature that we're really excited about, and we think makes a lot of sense. It's simple and powerful, and when combined with Bommer can save you a ton of time compared to the old way of doing things. That feature? Copy and paste from a spreadsheet to your drawing to create drawing tables.

Sometimes an idea uttered between laughing fits during a team meeting can catch fire and lead to something wonderful. This time, however, it led to us deciding to build an air cannon to launch dinner rolls, so you can safely and quickly deliver food to your loved ones while maintaining proper social distancing.

I remember a couple of months ago when my co-founder Jesse excitedly (a little too excitedly) announced that we would be bringing formulas into Bommer for Fusion 360. I was a bit confused at the time, thinking yea that sounded cool and all but what would it really deliver for our users? As we talked through the possibilities it would unlock, the coffee started kicking in and I started to understand. And then it hit me, kind of like...

Not long ago, in a website not very far away, our intrepid CEO, Jesse, and his friend Ryan at VPD (https://www.vpd.io) teamed up to bring you the first chapter of the Hardware Document Toolkit. Their goal with the BOM toolkit was to help uses of all skill levels understand what goes into a quality bill of materials, so they can build great BOMs for their products. This is especially important for individuals or teams who are just starting out, have only just kicked off work on their project, and/or cannot afford larger, more sophisticated BOM management solutions.

When you mention a Bill of Materials (BOM), most engineers immediately think: deliverable that comes at the end of design. At the end game. Something like...

(This is, apparently, as close as we could get without angering The Mouse. Good to know.)

Nemuno Banga, a Lithuania-based manufacturer, required a faster, more effective way to manage Bill-of-Materials (BOM) data while designing production lines to serve its global market. They found a solution in Bommer, a plug-in for top CAD/CAM software that automates and accelerates their BOM processes. Using Bommer, Nemuno Banga achieved:

• Time savings. Complex BOM processes that once took two to three days can now be completed up to 90% faster.
• Accuracy. Automation reduces the risk of human error and enables more precision in project forecasts and budgets.
• Flexibility. Customization options allow streamlining BOM processes across a wide range of projects.

219 Design, a product design consulting firm with clients around the globe, needed a faster, more efficient way to track the vast array of components within each product it designs. They found their solution in Bommer, a plug-in for top CAD/CAM software that automates and accelerates their BOM processes. Using Bommer, 219 Design achieved:

• Cost savings. Streamlined processes cut BOM preparation time by 80-90%, reducing costs for the firm’s clients.
• Efficiency. Time previously lost to manual BOM production gets devoted to high-value product design, engineering consulting and product development.
• Timeliness. Bommer helps engineers build custom BOM data into their projects earlier in the design process, where complete component data is immensely valuable.

Hardware is hard enough without having to worry about whether your documentation is at the right level to capture your plans, your intent, and your product. Bommer has worked hard to publish tools that make it easy to capture and export a bill of materials, straight from your CAD environment, to free up valuable engineering time and resources. We often get asked, though, what makes a good bill of materials? It’s a great question, and one to which we should have an answer. We're proud to share that Bommer has teamed up with Vinyard Product Development (VPD) to launch the Hardware Document Toolkit with its inaugural tool: Bill of Materials.

Scout Drone Inspection was looking for a way to produce product documentation driven by bill of materials (BOM) data; the tools built into Autodesk® Fusion 360™ made this a laborious and error prone process. They adopted Bommer to simplify data entry and automate exports that are then composited into a KPI spreadsheet. Bommer was easy to install and configure, and enabled the engineer at Scout to edit their component metadata, export specific subsystem BOMs to Excel, observe key metrics such as product weight, and ultimately incorporate these BOMs into the existing documentation. Using Bommer, Scout Drone Inspection achieved:

• 2.5 hours per week of heavy design activity time savings for single engineer over performing documentation updates manually (**20-30 hours **total throughout 2018)
• Repeatability and a net reduction in the opportunity for engineering and manufacturing errors to occur.

DarkVision Technologies was looking for a way to create better assembly drawings using Autodesk® Fusion 360™; they had recently transitioned from SOLIDWORKS to Fusion 360, but Fusion 360 does have the same level of support for custom properties or bills of materials on drawings. They adopted Bommer to add custom BOM properties to their parts and to generate custom tables for their assembly drawings. Bommer was easy to install and configure and enabled an “update once, use everywhere” bill of materials workflow that saves their engineers time and effort. Using Bommer, DarkVision achieved:

• Significant time savings over manually managing a bill of materials in Excel, or invoking SOLIDWORKS to create their drawings.
• A fundamental shift in workflow that emphasizes populating bill of materials data early, to prevent guesswork and lost time later in the project.
• Repeatability and a net reduction in the opportunity for engineering and manufacturing errors to occur, by reducing the number of changes required to update a bill of materials.

Corilam Fabricating Company (CFC, https://www.corilam.com/) was looking for a way to use bill of material data to improve their quotation and order acceptance turnaround times. They adopted Autodesk® Fusion 360™ as the front-end to their quoting process, but Fusion 360 does not support adding the required custom BOM properties to their design data. To add the data required to achieve their expected time savings, Corilam Fabricating Company (CFC) adopted Bommer for Fusion 360. Bommer was easy to install and configure; it enabled their engineers to populate the required properties on their library parts, and later extract a bill of materials from the accepted, quoted design without significant additional effort. Using Bommer, CFC achieved:

• 50% time savings during the quoting process, over manually generating the required information manually.
• Additional >50% time savings after quote is accepted, over manually gathering bill of materials data for the project engineers.
• Repeatability and a net reduction in the opportunity for manufacturing errors to occur.
• Set up in “minutes”.