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Bills of Materials

A Bill of Materials (BOM) is the reusable recipe for making a product: the steps to follow, the materials each step consumes, the labour tasks, the equipment needed, and what comes out the other end. Set it up once; every work order created from it inherits the whole plan, scaled to the run quantity.

Building a BOM

A BOM is a list of steps in order. Click Add Step, give it a name and instructions (these appear to the operator during production), then add what the step needs:

  • Tasks (Add Task): the labour, as a task product with a quantity (typically hours), and optionally the employee taxonomies qualified to perform it
  • Equipment (Add Equipment): assets or machines the step uses, with quantities
  • Products (Add Product): the materials consumed, with required quantities
  • Dynamic Products (Add Dynamic Product): materials defined by taxonomy rather than as a fixed product, resolved when each work order runs. For example, “one 2L tin of paint, colour chosen per job”
  • By-products (Add By-product): secondary outputs the step produces

Each item shows its cost, quantity and mode in the step table, so you can see the expected cost of the recipe build up as you go.

Fixed vs variable quantities

Every task, equipment and material line has a mode:

  • Variable: scales with the work order quantity. Making 50 units needs 50× the material of making one.
  • Fixed: the same regardless of quantity. One machine setup, one batch of cleaning, one test run.

Getting modes right is what makes per-unit costing accurate across different batch sizes.

Outputs

The BOM’s outputs define what the recipe produces: the product(s), expected quantity per recipe-unit, and unit of measure. When a work order completes, produced quantities are received into stock against these outputs.

Using a BOM

  • Work order setup: choose Select from BOM when setting up a work order; the steps, materials and outputs are copied in and variable quantities scale by the run quantity. See Setting Up a Work Order.
  • Material sourcing: when a work order material is itself something you make, sourcing can create a child work order from the component’s BOM. See Sourcing Materials.

Changing a BOM affects future work orders created from it; work orders already set up keep the copy they took.