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.

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.

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.