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In reading about SCM (software configuration mgt, not supply chain mgt), I have seen mention of a "Bill of Materials" as a document provided with a build. What goes into the Bill of Materials document, and what is its purpose?
Is this a commonly used document?
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asked Mar 11 '09 04:03
A bill of materials (BOM) is a comprehensive inventory of the raw materials, assemblies, subassemblies, parts and components, as well as the quantities of each needed to manufacture a product. In a nutshell, it is the complete list of all the items that are required to build a product.
The two main types of BOMs are engineering BOMs and manufacturing BOMs.
A bill of materials is the list of all the raw materials, resources, components, assemblies and parts - and the quantities of each of them - that are required to manufacture a product. In a simpler sense, a bill of materials is like an industrial recipe for creating an end product.
In process industries, the BOM is also known as the formula, recipe, or ingredients list.
The actual contents and meaning of a SCM's "Bill of Materials" (BOM) depends on the tools being used and the shop. Loosely speaking they tend to be just a simple listing of the files used to build the system/product/component.
The BOM cannot be complete unless it includes version information on each of the files in it's list.
I have actively support SCM systems for the last 10 years and we never used this terminology. The place where I have seen the term "Bill of Materials" (BOM) used before was in Manufacturing, where it was meant to be all the physical parts used to assemble the product.
In the Hi-tech companies I worked with we used the same concept, a listing of version specified files used to build the software at some point in time. In fact the listing of these files (with version numbers) were specially used to verify what portions of the product changed between releases.
Remember the version numbers, without these, the listing is not very useful.
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It's an enumeration of each of the components in an installation module.
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