Bills of Material (BOMs) contain important master data for integrated materials management and shop floor control. The engineering design department designs new products based on their suitability for production and their intended function. The result of this product design phase is drawings and a list of all the required parts, namely the BOM.
You can find BOMs in various forms wherever finished or semifinished products are produced from several component parts or materials.
Depending on the industry sector, you can refer to the BOM as either of the following:
- Recipe
- List of ingredients
BOM Integration
Data saved in BOMs forms a significant basis for various areas within production planning.
The engineering design department creates BOMs. You can create BOMs in SAP S/4HANA using a computer-aided drawing (CAD) program and a CAD interface.
You can use BOMs in the following areas:
- Material requirements planning (MRP) explodes BOMs to determine economical order quantities at a particular point in time.
- Work scheduling makes BOMs the basis for planning operations and shop floor control.
- Production order management uses BOMs to plan the provision of parts.
- The departments responsible for handling reservations, goods issues, and sales orders use BOMs as an aid to enter data.
- Product costing uses BOMs to calculate material usage costs for a product.
You can use the BOM data simultaneously in several areas of a company. The integrated modules that are linked together facilitate the flow of data between various work areas and allow users to access the current values at any time.
Prerequisites
Before you work with material BOMs, you have to answer several questions. Some of them are answerde inside customizing, some of them when you create a material BOM.
BOM Usage
The BOM usage has to be defined inside initial screen together with the material number.
Low-Level Code
When you create a material BOM and you assign components, these components can be header materials of existing BOMs. An assembly indicator becomes visible. This corresponds with the low level code
The low-level codes have the following key features and uses:
- They are used in MRP to determine the sequence in which materials are planned.
- They are used by product costing to determine how costs are rolled up.
- They take into account that a material may be used in multiple products and at multiple production levels of one product.
- They are the lowest explosion level at which a material occurs in all the product structures.
- They collect the total requirements for a material at the lowest explosion level where it is used.
BOM Status
The mentioned BOM status is defined as a header and an item status.
The following are examples of how the BOM statuses are defined:
- BOM A:
A BOM with status 1 can be exploded in MRP and released for a planned order.
- BOM B:
A BOM with status 2 cannot be exploded in MRP or released for a planned order.
When you configure your system in customizing, you can define item status fields as required, optional, or disallowed.
Units of Measure
Note
The system uses the base unit of measure from the material master record as the default unit. However, if the alternative unit of measure (unit of issue) is maintained in the Work Scheduling view, this unit of measure can be used instead.The unit of measure uses the conversion factor between the base unit of measure and the unit of issue. However, you must enter the conversion factor while maintaining the unit of issue.