A BOM (Bill of materials) is a structured arrangement of parts or assemblies needed to produce a different parent assembly. In process industries, the BOM is also known as the formula, recipe, or ingredients list.

Technically speaking, a BOM consists of a list of materials (Input) with quantities that must be used to produce a new material (Output). BOMs in Variobatch represent only one production stage at a time. If several production stages are necessary for the production of an end product, several BOMs have to be created, the result material of the subordinate BOM in turn appears as a component in the parent BOM.

BOMs can be versioned. Technically this means that there can be different BOMs for the production of a material which are tagged with a unique version number. If you want to explicitly specify a versioned BOM in another versioned BOM (subordinate production level), a BOM reference can be specified in the material list instead of the material number.

A BOM can only be created by assigning a material workflow. The intermediate products from the material workflow become components of the material list and must be linked to the other components/parts.

Multiple alternative components can be specified for each component. This is required if the original material is not available and an equivalent can be used for it.

 

Menu item "Master data-> Bill of materials" opens the program for managing BOMs.

 

The data of a BOM is distributed over four tabs:

1. BOM Header
2. Components
3. Intermediates
4. Workflow

In order to create a BOM, you must perform the following work:

1. In material management, materials must be created for the material list (components, Input) and for the resulting product (output).
2. A material workflow must exist. 
3. Optional: For a route check, storage locations and bins must be created and must exist in stock.
4. Optional: Workflows must be created for a BOM-related configuration of a workflow.