Bills of Material (BOM)

 Bills of Material in the company

Bills of material are used for different purposes. The usage depends on the enterprise area, for example:

• The engineering/design bill of material includes all the elements of the product (from an engineering viewpoint) and contains the technical data. It is usually not dependent on the order.

• The production bill of material includes the items (from a production viewpoint) and assembly conditions. For the assembly, for example, only items relevant to production with process-oriented data are required.

• The costing bill of material reproduces the product structure and forms the basis for automatic determination of the material usage costs for a product. Items that are not relevant for costing are not included in this bill of material.

Instead of a uniform bill of material, these areas use "their own" bill of material with area-specific data (for example, production). They only evaluate bills of material containing area-specific data. This results in a targeted bill of material explosion, whereby only the area-specific data is made available. Data selection is controlled using the definition of the bill of material usage. A determination sequence by bill of material usage is defined in Customizing for selecting the correct bill of material for an application.

Bills of Material in Plant Maintenance

The maintenance bill of material differs from other BOMs in that it only contains items relevant to Plant Maintenance.

The maintenance bill of material has three important functions:

• Structuring of the object : The structure of an object should be displayed as clearly as possible from a maintenance viewpoint.
  

• Spare parts planning in the order: If a bill of material exists for a technical object, it can be used during the planning process of a maintenance order for the purpose of spare parts identification and planning.

• Spare parts planning in the task list: Spare parts can be planned in the task list based on a bill of material.

Three are three categories of maintenance bill of material:

• Material BOM
• Equipment BOM
• Functional location BOM

Bills of Material: Example of Material BOM

Material BOMs are always used in Plant Maintenance if a number of similarly constructed objects have to be maintained. The aim is not to create a bill of material for each technical object, but to create just one bill of material and then assign this to the technical objects. This avoids the use of redundant bills of material.

A material BOM is a bill of material that is first created for a material independently of a technical object. To do this, you must:

• Create a material
• Create a material BOM for the material

The bill of material can then be assigned to one or more technical objects (equipment or functional location). You can make the assignment(s) in the respective technical object master record using the Structure view. The number of the corresponding material is entered in the Construction type field.