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How do you manage variations in your BOM (Bill of Material)?

yugandhar

Preparing the bill of materials (BOM) is a crucial step before sending the assembly files to fabrication houses. The BOM plays a crucial role in the fabrication process, as fabrication houses need this data for various purposes like purchasing components or running it through silicon expert. Organizations follow their own template for BOM and may also be required to follow the guidelines of fabrication houses. 

Very often, different BOMs are required for the same design with some minor changes like different values for components, deletion of components as per regional compliances, etc. Making these changes in the BOM manually is a challenging task and is error prone. Creating unique designs and generating a BOM for each design is much more time consuming. 

How do you handle these BOM variations? Do you use any of the following methods to achieve this?   

  1. Create separate designs and generate a BOM for each design. 
  2. Generate one BOM for the core design and make the changes in the BOM manually. 
  3. Create design variants within the same core design and generate BOMs for the variants.  

Do let us know if you use any other smart method for generating different BOMs. 

  • #3.  

    Variants capture and preserve part substitutions for future "make from" designs. 

    "No Touch" BOMS aren't lazy.  They're safer.  "Variant View mode" was key to convincing my group to use variants. 

    RF Circuits have a lot of NL slots before we have a chance to bring up and tune the assembly.  We don't know what those values are, or if they need to be an L or C.  RF circuits de-tune if you change the plastic enclosure.  We have variants that drive "naked" bench testing (need to build dozens of boards at a time.)

    Operations and marketing groups need block-by-block cost breakdowns. I make DoNotPopulate copies of the assembly groups.  Build variants that only export an XLS for a specific block.   Then we make part substitutions and run each variant again.

    Variants are a bit of work to implement.  But, they are key to our accuracy.

    We can't abandon the schematic DSN once we finalize "As-built" BOMs after tuning and regulatory.  The schematic must be updated to regenerate an accurate BOM as a future project will ignore our as-built BOM until things stop working..

  • #3 Variants, managed through a custom GUI

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