Bill Of Materials (Bom)

In business and engineering, a bill of materials or product structure (sometimes bill of material, BOM or associated list) is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture an end product.

A BOM may be used for communication between manufacturing partners or confined to a single manufacturing facility. A bill of materials is often hierarchical in nature, allowing easy aggregation of components into higher-level assemblies. In this way it can also be thought of as representing a tree structure.

At its most granular level, a BOM is an inventory that contains all the information necessary to purchase every part required to build something. This could be as simple as a list of screws, nails and boards needed to construct a piece of furniture or as complex as electronic components needed to assemble an iPhone