What an automatically generated BOM is and why it matters for a manufacturer

BOM stands for "bill of materials." It's the document that says exactly what the ordered product is made from: which panels, which profiles, which hardware, which consumables, in what quantities, for each piece.

Every production flow has, explicitly or implicitly, some form of bill of materials. The problem isn't that it's missing. The problem is who writes it, and when.

What a manual flow can look like

The usual flow goes something like this: the salesperson makes the quote, usually in a file built up over time. The client accepts. Then someone — the workshop manager, the technologist, sometimes the same salesperson — looks over the quote and writes the bill of materials for production and procurement.

So the information is written twice. Once so the client finds out the cost, again so the workshop finds out what needs to be done. Between the two writings, there's a person interpreting.

This is where the problems appear, but only later:

• The quote and the list don't say the same thing. The client requested a change by phone, the quote was updated, the list wasn't.
• The calculation is done from what stuck in someone's memory, not from what was actually quoted. Especially with accessories and consumables, where the difference is small per piece and large per order.
• Procurement orders based on estimates. Either too much, and it sits in the warehouse, or too little, and work stops.
• The calculation becomes hard to redo and check. When an order comes out at a loss, no one can say where the margin went, because there's no link between what was quoted and what was actually consumed.

What "automatically generated" means

An automatically generated BOM means the bill of materials is no longer written. It's calculated from the same configuration that produced the price.

In practice: the salesperson configures the product — dimensions, model, finish, options. The system applies your rules and calculates the price. The moment the quote is accepted, the same rules also produce the list: the pieces to be cut with their dimensions, the material for each piece, the accessories per unit, the consumables, plus what needs to be ordered from the supplier.

AI isn't necessarily needed here. It's product logic: the same rules that determine the configuration and the price can also generate the bill of materials. The difference is that this second use no longer goes through a person.

Why it matters, in practice

It reduces the risk of the quote and production using different versions of the same configuration. If something in the configuration changes, the price changes too, and so does the list. There's no "good" version and an "old" version circulating in parallel through the company.

You see the real consumption, per order. When the list comes from the configuration, you can compare what should have been consumed with what actually was. The difference between the two is the most useful piece of information a manufacturer can have, and it becomes much harder to track when the list is redone by hand.

Procurement orders based on confirmed demand. From accepted orders comes the aggregated requirement, by material and by supplier, not an estimate made by someone recalling what's coming up.

Knowledge no longer sits in a single person's head. In many workshops there's a single person who knows exactly what goes into a product. When that person is on holiday or leaves, the company quotes worse. Rules written into a system stay with the company.

You can answer the question "why does it cost that much." Every line in the price is backed by a quantity and a material. The discussion with the client happens over components, not over a total that no one can verify.

What needs to be ready for it to work

An automatic BOM is only useful if what's behind it is true. Before any system, you need:

• Written product rules. Which combinations are possible, which accessories each variant requires, what mutually excludes what.
• A clean materials catalogue. Unique codes, consistent units of measure, prices updated from a single source.
• Accepted consumption and waste figures. Panels lose material when cut, bars lose material when trimmed. If today that waste is covered by a general markup, in the system it needs to become an explicit rule, otherwise the calculation comes out lower than reality.
• An answer for special cases. Every workshop has orders that fall outside the pattern. The system needs to allow manual intervention, but flag it — otherwise exceptions become the rule and no one trusts the numbers anymore.

It's not an all-or-nothing project

You don't have to move the whole production line to automatic BOM to see a result. You can start with a single product family — the one that sells most often, or the one where margin is most often lost — and leave the rest as it is.

After the first product family, it becomes clear what still needs cleaning up in the catalogue, and which rules weren't actually as clear as they seemed.

If you'd like to see what the full link from request to workshop looks like, it's described on the configurator and quoting page. And if you'd like to start from what you have now, in the free audit we take a real order and check how much of its bill of materials could be calculated on its own.