Building your Bill of Materials

A Bill of Materials (BOM), is essentially a list of products that are required to produce another product. You can think of it like the list of ingredients for a recipe. Odoo needs to know what materials are required for us to produce this Class of 2017 T-shirt product.

In complex products, a bill of materials can be nested. For example, it may take many products to make a sub-product, and then several sub-products to make a final product.

Don't let nested BOMs intimidate you. Once you understand how a simple BOM is processed, you will more easily see how you can group parts together. Think about grouping more complex BOMs by assembly and workcenters. This makes it easier to see your inventory in real time, as BOMs can be processed at each stage of your operations, properly using up materials and creating finished sub-assemblies.

For our first BOM example, we will be keeping it simple. We are just going to require the white T-shirt. The rest of the operation, printing the actual T-shirt, will be incorporated into the manufacturing order. In other words, if there are enough white T-shirts, this manufacturing order can be processed, and we can produce the final product. For now, the inks and screens will not be managed in the manufacturing process. This is an example of starting simple and adding more complexity as we build up the system.

A smart button at the top right of the form shows you a count of BOMs attached to this product:

Clicking this button will bring up the bill of materials listing for that product:

Naturally this is a blank list, as we have not yet defined any bill of materials for this product. Notice in the top-right corner the product filter that is restricting this list view to only display the Bill of Materials that are for the Class of 2017 T-shirt.

Clicking Create will now bring up a blank Bill of Materials form with the Class of 2017 T-shirt automatically pre-populated as the finished product to build:

Many of the fields will be automatically filled out as Odoo knows we are creating a bill of materials for our Class of 2017 T-Shirt product. In this example, we have added the Medium White T-Shirt to the bill of materials. When we manufacture one Class of 2017 T-Shirt, we will require one medium white T-shirt.

Many times, if not most of the time, a bill of materials will contain multiple items. Regardless of the number of items in the bill of materials, the way they are processed is the same.

It is possible that your manufacturing order or bill of materials screen may look slightly different than the ones you see here. One reason is that, depending on the modules that are installed and what options are selected, the forms may have different content. Another common reason is that Odoo is currently getting frequent updates that can change the appearance of a given form.

Table of Contents for Building your Bill of Materials

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Table of Contents for
Building your Bill of Materials