What is an engineering bill of materials (eBOM)? Why is it important?
The engineering bill of materials (eBOM) is created by engineers at the very beginning of product design and is updated continuously to reflect changes to the design over the course of product development and even production. It is a hierarchical representation of the assemblies, subassemblies, and components that describe the finished product to inform engineering activities, sourcing activities, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, service, even end-of-life activities like recycling or reuse. The eBOM is a crucial resource in the product lifecycle because it ensures all functions that make decisions about the product are aligned to a comprehensive, up-to-date product description.
How does an engineering BOM (eBOM) help?
Engineering bills of material (eBOMs) are necessary to establish digitized downstream activities—such as manufacturing process management—that work in tandem with product design. For example, the detailed and precise list of materials can (and should) be used as the reference for both the manufacturing BOM (mBOM) and service BOM (sBOM). Creating these derivative BOMs with a PLM tool that maintains associativity ensures a smooth transition between the design and production phases.
Best-practice eBOM management also reduces errors and accelerates change management and aids in cost estimation and control.
Three reasons to complete an accurate eBOM
Prevents errors and extra revision cycles
An accurate eBOM ensures that all components and assemblies are correctly listed, reducing the risk of manufacturing errors and rework. With the right level of detail in the eBOM, extra and unnecessary changes in the manufacturing process can be avoided.
Facilitates smooth transition
Engineering BOMs provide a reliable foundation for creating the manufacturing BOM (mBOM) and service BOM (sBOM), ensuring a seamless handoff from design to production. With a comprehensive BOM, manufacturing will have adequate information to design tools for new parts and time to test processes before production fully ramps.
Improves cost management
Accurate eBOMs help in precise cost estimation and budget control by clearly defining all materials and components needed, aiding in effective financial planning. Companies can negotiate with multiple vendors to obtain the most competitive pricing. Providing the eBOM to procurement early in product development or following an engineering change also ensures that part orders are accurate and delivered on time, without need to expedite.
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Customer stories
Enable product design to associatively create the engineering BOM from up-to-date CAD and PLM data
Encourage collaboration
Share eBOMs earlier to gain feedback from others based on validating and optimizing preliminary versions of BOMs
Manage engineering change
Automate updates to the eBOM, and created associative BOMs for manufacturing, service, and others
Create a digital thread
Associate product data across the value chain, leveraging multi-system data orchestration, and release to ERP/MES
Enable scale and performance
Easily manage large data sets, configurations, and variants with our flexible PLM data model
PTCs BOM management solution
With the breakthrough PLM capabilities of PTC’s Windchill enterprise solution, you’ll be enabled to adopt a part-centric approach to managing your BOMs with access to a single source of truth for all product data. From early concept through all iterations, design cycles, and stages, experience true closed-loop lifecycle management until your product is fully realized.
"Through a consistent digital thread of information running through our product's lifecycle, we have been able to reduce production time and errors, and reduce our stock of product components due to the precision introduced into the manufacturing process."
BENETEAU Group