Manju,

A bill or material is usually systematically built to reflect the manufacturing process.  To expand on that concept you start with raw materials, they in turn become sub-assemblies which in turn become a final product.

Inherently there are two major thought process to the BOM; (1) the engineering BOM which is general comprised of material solely and might not have all the information required to manufacture and (2) the BOM used to manufacture, which usually adds fine touches such as assembly instructions and bulk material like screws and standoffs which are required to manufacture yet not important to the engineering process.

If you sit down and map out the process from engineering to manufacturing and capture their needs you should be able to discover how you should build your BOMs.  

Gas and liquid consumption is inherently interesting since you will have two distinctly units of measure… that which is ordered and that which is consumed.  You could place it in your BOM at a quantity of zero and allow a CANBAN system to maintain stock (with this you can keep the UOM as that which is used for purchasing).  You may also call out the exact amount required by each process yet I don’t really think you gain anything going this route). 

A couple of things to be aware of; if your BOMs are being consumed downstream in an ERP you want to be conscious of setting any items quantity to 0 that is not actually consumes such as an assembly instruction.  Also when placing assemblies together you will need to decide on management rules that may be required for RMA or stocking purposes.  Example, if I make a change to a child item of a BOM (knowing that I DO NOT have to change the revision of the parent) do I need to be cognizant that this assembly will be stored on a shelf and needs to be distinguished from older stock…. must force a rev change at the parent level since more than likely the older stock will need to be reworked.

This should be enough information to get you going.

Good point Manju and good answer Patrick.
I’d like to add a little bit on this question.
Some clients used to have the EBOM (Engineering BOM) at Agile side and MBOM (ManufacturingBOM) at ERP side. In fact they can have different MBOMs regarding the site manufacturing the product.
You also can hold different BOMs in Agile using the Distribute Manufacturing concept, which means using the Sites to hold the differences.
I agree with Patrick that you don’t need to call out the exact amount required by each process, because at ERP side you’ll have some extra documents like the manufacturing process that can deal with it, for example.

Good luck
Carlos

Hi Manju,

The BOM which you manage within side the PLM system should capture the lowest level of material used as raw material. From there on, your product should hold the information needed to achieve the final goods.
I’ve created a short diagram illustrating the above with 2 examples. One from the consumer electronics industry, and another example from the pharmaceutical industry.
Note, where an item has child items underneath, this represents a step in the production process and normally could be called as an assembly.
Hope this helps somehow.

Best regards,
Ron Ziv