Product request details - 2. Bill of materials

Creating a bill of materials

In order to plan the development or modification of a product one of the first things to set up is the bill of materials (BOM) needed for it. The Bill of materials tab of the Product request details page offers three ways to specify a BOM:

• duplicate the BOM of an item that already exists in the system (which means it exists in your ERP system);
• start with an empty list, adding the required items one by one manually;
• import a list from Excel.

Even if you create your BOM from an external source (i.e. by duplication or import), you can edit it later manually.

Duplicate the BOM of an existing item

To clone the BOM of an existing item, click the Select item button in the Duplicate from an existing item box, and pick an item from the dropdown list.

As soon as you select an item that does have a BoM, that BOM is copied into your product request as in the screenshot below.

The item itself is not cloned in this case. Only its BOM is duplicated.

If your product's BOM already contains materials and they match any of the materials in the copied BOM, only the new materials are added to your list.

Start with an empty list

To create a BOM from scratch, click the Continue button in the Start with an empty list box.

An empty BOM table will be displayed that you can start filling up by clicking the + Add material button, and selecting from the dropdown list.

Enter the Quantity and Quantity per values for each material (see Managing the bill of materials).

Import a BOM specified in Excel

If you have a BOM available in another system, e.g. CAD software, you may want to export that list into Excel, and then import the Excel file into Build. To do so, click the Select file button at the bottom of the Import from Excel box, and browse for the file to be imported.

If the file you choose has a format that Build cannot interpret, you will get an error message such as the one below.

To make sure you have the correct format, you may want to download Build's Excel template by clicking the corresponding button on the top of the Import from Excel box (shown in a green frame in the previous screenshot). You may also download the template simply from here.

The Excel file needs to have at least 5 columns, in the same order as the first 5 columns of a BOM in Build (see Managing the bill of materials), and should not have more than one worksheet. Any additional columns beyond the first 5 will be ignored in the import process. The first row is also ignored, as it is expected to contain the header of the data.

Managing the bill of materials

A BOM in Build is a table that contains the following 6 columns:

• Code - The material item's code as in your ERP system
• Name - The material item's name as in your ERP system
• Unit of measure - The material item's unit of measure as in your ERP system
• Quantity - The quantity of the material item to be used for the number of product units specified in the Quantity per column
• Quantity per - The number of product units that can be produced using the amount of material specified in the Quantity column
• Status - There is a label in this column if an item has one or more other product request(s) open, or if, for some reason, it cannot be found in the database. The labels are clickable and display a popup menu.

You can check out the other request open for the given item by selecting View request or, when there are multiple requests open for the given item, go back to the planning board by clicking View requests.

Selecting Add new item above takes you to the Create item screen. Use Create request to add a new product request for the given item. Clicking Relink item opens a dropdown list of items and you can select another item for the given row of the BOM.

Editing the BOM

You can always change the Quantity and Quantity per values in your BOM as needed.

If the quantity of a material used in the product request's operation plan is changed, the quantities in the BOM are synchronized.

To remove item(s) from the BOM, tick the checkbox on the left of the corresponding row and then click Remove from BOM on the black banner that appears on the top of the screen.

You can also remove an item from the BOM using the options (°°°) menu on the right side of the list.

If a material used in the request's operation plan is removed from the BOM, it is also removed from the operation plan.

The options menu also allows you to replace an item with another one that you can select from a dropdown list. In this case, the quantity does not change, but can be modified.

The Create request option makes it easy to add a product request for an item that is listed in the BOM.