What is a Bill of Materials (BOM) and how to create one?
A Bill of Materials (BOM) is one of the most important part to include in your tech pack.
It helps you you never miss a single thread, button, zipper, or tiny detail when manufacturing your garments.
It’s also an important tool to assess quality and nail down your product costing and pricing.
Read on for a complete refresher on Bill of Materials: what it contains, why it’s essential and several examples within Techpacker.
First things first…
What is a Bill of Materials (BOM)?
It’s a list of your product’s components with corresponding costs and quantities.
Note: A BOM is specific per colorway. In other words, if you have three 3 colorways, you’ll need a BOM for each color.
Think of it as both recipe and shopping list for creating fashion products.
It’s a master document used by every role in your supply chain: designers, merchandisers, buyers and sales.
So make sure to include a comprehensive and 100% accurate BOM in every tech pack.
You also use it to communicate with your manufacturing partner.
It helps you and your factory stay on the same page during production.
Manufacturers work with many different brands and clients. They have a ton of fabrics, trims and details to keep track of.
If your BOM is easy to read and comprehensive, your factory will get a better sense of the time needed for cutting and sewing.
It also makes it easier to determine the real cost of your product and its price fluctuation.
Click here to see a bill of material example created on Techpacker.
Want to create one just like it? Sign up for a free 7-day trial.
Here’s 5 reasons why Bills of Materials are crucial
1—It’s your custom shopping list
Your BOM lists every raw material and quantity needed to create your fashion product. Procurement of materials is simply impossible without it.
2 — Better costing and pricing
How?
Since it lists all materials with its respective quantities and up-to-date prices, your BOM tells you how much it costs to make your product today, under current market prices.
From there, you can easily calculate your potential profit margins and come up with an adequate pricing strategy for your product.
Click here to see a costing sheet example created on Techpacker.
3 — Your factory won’t miss any components
You can make your BOM even more useful by listing your material in the right sequence. (The order used to manufacture your product)
This takes out a source for potential mistakes for your factory.
Imagine an engine in a car factory for a second.
Without all the components listed in the correct order, it won’t ever run!
Unlike an engine, you have more leeway with the sequence when listing materials for garments.
But it’s always best practice to establish an order to prevent production mistakes.
4 — It creates standards for manufacturing
A garment has to run through several steps from its inception until the final order.
The BOM helps you present this process to your factory and helps them understand how the raw materials are converted into the final product.
Once the BOM is defined, it can be used as part of the Standard Manufacturing Process to ensure quality and consistency for every batch.
5 — It helps your entire supply chain work as one
By its very nature, a Bill of Materials helps all departments work together.
To create an accurate BOM, you need the input from design, procurement, manufacturer and sales.
Designers, merchandisers, quality planners, factory and vendors will all consult it throughout the product development process.
What should I include in my Bill of Materials?
- Item description
- Consumption (per piece) with a defined unit of measure
- Placement description
- Projected cost per unit
- Supplier name
- Status
- Item color or color code
See the following Bill of Material format:
Creating a Bill of Materials on Techpacker
You can create a Bill of Materials in a snap on Techpacker.
One click and a perfectly formatted table appears for you to fill out.
You add all your materials as individual Cards and “stack them up” in a table.
This makes it easy for you to visualize, edit and reuse parts of your BOM.
Once your techpack is ready, you can print it in PDF format in one click.
Your Bill of Materials is automatically formatted for you. No need to adjust rows and columns on a spreadsheet.
Benefits of using Techpacker to create and manage BOMs
- Perfect formatting: It’s as cool as it sounds. One click and your BOM is formatted for you, ready to print.
- Version control: Each version of your BOM is saved in the cloud and time stamped. This ensures everything is organized in one place and not scattered in emails and shared drives.
- Easily shared: You control access to your BOMs and techpacks. Share them with team members and manufacturers. You can even share different versions with a link for a read only format.
- Infinitely reusable: Your Bill of Materials is built from Cards — each representing a design detail. You can save and then reuse any parts of your BOM on other tech packs.
Create flawless Bill of Materials and manage them on Techpacker
This is our blog post version of our Techpacker binged newsletter, a compendium of top industry knowledge about the most important topics in garment product development.
There’s no need to wait until we post it here, sign up to receive it directly in your inbox bi-weekly!
To get fresh industry updates and original content in your inbox every week, sign up for the Techpacker weekly newsletter! no spam, only carefully curated news!.
Want to get better pricing from your supplier?
Wonder if the price quoted by your supplier is “reasonable” ?
Could you get a lower price somewhere else?
With your BOM now in-hand, check out these tips from our friends at Intouch Manufacturing to help you negotiate the best prices with factories.
To become the ultimate fashion manufacturing master…
Check out the following blog posts:
