Everything you wanted to know about openBOM Bill of Materials types
Terminology can be tough. Place two engineers in the same room and they will likely give you three options on what to call the same thing. In the past few weeks I’ve been asked many times about the different types of BOMs you can create and manage using openBoM. So I decided it’s worth spending some time and writing a blog post to discuss them. I hope you’ll find it helpful.
For the purposes of this post, I will use a fictitious product: a simple bike. The picture below shows you the overall product view. I’d like to apologize for the drastic oversimplification; of course a real bike has many more parts.
There are three types of BOMs in openBoM: single level, part list, and multi-level. In the following pictures I will show you the differences between BOMs as well as how openBom generates them from CAD data.
1. Part list.
This one is the most commonly used type of BOM to order parts for your product. openBoM can create a BOM which represents all the parts collected from all assemblies and sub-assy levels.
On the picture below, Part list for Bike.
The challenge with this type of BOM is to exclude all purchased and phantom assemblies, otherwise the Part list will have wrong parts and wrong quality. Bam!! Not good.
2. Single level BOM.
Single level BOMs are created from any assembly in a CAD Top Level assembly. The BOM grabs all subassemblies and parts from a specific level and places them in the list.
Here is a single level BOM for Frame assembly:
Single levels are useful for creating a BOM list to place on a drawing for a specific assembly.
3. Multi-level BOM.
A multi-level BOM is one which creates a hierarchy of parts, sub-assy and assemblies. In openBoM, it is a set of single level BOMs representing each level. You can see and manage them separately. They are connected by Name and/or Part Number references.
In data model, these are connected entities. But they can be also edited and represented independently at the same time.
You can navigate through these types of BOMs using the openBoM multi-level BOM view and see all the Parts.
Conclusion. I hope you now have a better understanding of BOM types in openBoM. We are not done by any means and will keep improving openBoM. If you think or see something should be changed or improved, please let me know. We’re closing a few feature gaps and addressing some improvements, all which will be coming soon. These includes an ability to switch dynamically between multi-level and a part list (quantity) BOM, plus a few more things we hope you’ll like
Please let me know what do you think.
Best, Oleg @ openbom.com
