Bill of Material in SAP

Definition

A bill of material is a complete, formally structured list of the components that make up a product or assembly. The list contains the object number of each component, together with the quantity and unit of measure.
A bill of material can only refer to a quantity of at least 1 of an object.

BOM Category

In the SAP System, you can use BOMs to represent different objects (such as materials, equipment, functional location BOMs, and documents) and to maintain object-specific data.

• Material BOM
  Material BOMs are mainly used to represent the structure of products manufactured within your company. You can enter both materials and documents as components of this BOM.
• Equipment BOM
  Equipment BOMs are used to describe the structure of equipment and to assign spare parts to equipment for maintenance purposes.
• Functional location BOM
  Bills of material for functional locations group together the elements of a technical structure, such as the functional unit of an entire plant.
• Document structure
  A complex document may be made up of several documents, such as a program, technical drawings, papers, and photographs. These related information and documentation objects are grouped together as a unit using a document structure – a BOM for a document.
• Order BOM
  You work with order BOMs when you specially tailor the make-to-order production of your products to the requirements of your customers. In order to meet the customer requirements, sales order specific modifications to various assemblies are often required. Furthermore, assemblies are often specially constructed for a particular sales order.BOMs of this category are linked to sales orders, so they are known as sales order BOMs or order BOMs.
• Work breakdown structure (WBS) BOM
  Production lots for finished and semi-finished products can be planned and manufactured using different BOMs. For example, a substituted component can trigger a targeted cost calculation and evaluation per production lot during the planning stage before sales.
  The number of a production lot is a WBS element from the Project System. You use this number to plan and manufacture the production lot for an assembly, and calculate the planned and actual costs for producing the assembly. Because of the reference to a WBS element from the Project System, these BOMs are known as WBS BOMs.

Effetivity

Validity areas and periods are used to define the precise conditions under which a bill of material is valid in different areas of a company.

• Area of Validity
  Material BOMs can be valid on different organizational levels:
  • You can use a material BOM to manage data that applies directly to production. This is why the area of validity is the plant. The plant is the location where all necessary work-scheduling procedures are organized, such as MRP and creating routings.
    In this case, you create a plant-specific BOM.
  • However, you can also create a group BOM, without reference to a plant. For example, a designer maintains a group BOM during the design phase of a product, then the BOM is allocated to one or more plants for production purposes.
• Validity Period
  The validity period is the time during which the BOM header or BOM item is valid. This period is delimited by the following data in the BOM header and BOM item.

Technical Types

• Variant BOM
  A variant BOM groups together several BOMs that describe different objects (for example, products) with a high proportion of identical parts. A variant BOM describes the specific product variant for each product, with all its components and assemblies.
• Multiple BOM
  A multiple BOM groups together several BOMs that describe one object (for example, a product) with different combinations of materials for different processing methods.

BOM Usage

By BOM usage you can maintain separate BOMs for different areas within your company, such as design or production.

Structure of a BOM

• BOM Header
  The BOM header contains data that applies to the entire BOM.
• BOM Items
  The BOM item contains data that only applies to a specific component of the BOM.
• Sub-Items
  Sub-items contain data on the different installation points for partial quantities of an item.