Download Bills of Materials (BOM) excel template for businesses and manufacturing entities.
If you are starting a business that manufactures or assembles products, you are going to need to create and maintain a bill of materials (BoM) for your products. If you are designing, selling, or servicing a product, you must need some instructions and a list of materials.
Although you may eventually need to use more advanced inventory control software. A full-fledged Material Requirement Planning system, you can get start using our free Bill of Materials template like this one as per requirement.
Understanding Bills of Materials (BOM)
A bill of materials (BoM) is a listing of materials and parts used to manufacturer some products.
Each material in the list should include the quantity required and a unique part number that can be used to identify the exact part or material to acquire from the supplier.
Additional information that can be included in a BoM, or that information may be available elsewhere.
For complex materials, some of the parts listed in a bill of materials may be sub-assemblies and each have their own BoM as well. For larger companies or more complex products, the BoM is a crucial part of larger Material Resource Planning (MRP) System. In this case, the MRP system might be able to export the list to an Excel spreadsheet.
The bill of materials spreadsheet is originally design to identify the parts needed for various custom designs.
Most people can easily create their own bill of materials spreadsheet from scratch, but this template will provide an example and even save time.
Note: It may not always be possible or desirable to include photos, but when applicable, pictures can be tremendously helpful.
What are Material Resource Planning Software ?
MRP software, a type of ERP software suited for manufacturers, is one tool that many manufacturers and distributors opt to purchase, mainly because of its focus on efficiency and productivity within the manufacturing realm.
Using a Spreadsheet-Based BoM Management in Practice
It’s very easy to use the template to create a bill of materials for a single assembly. But, as your product(s) become more complex, you’ll quickly face the following problems:
- Security and Access Control – Using spreadsheets as primary data source for process definitions can lead to problems. When it comes to security, giving people different access privilege etc.
- Change Management – What happens when an engineer makes a change to their bill of materials but the manufacturer is still using an old copy of spreadsheet. These types of errors are difficult to avoid without using a central primary database. A BoM spreadsheet file is not much different than having a printed copy of the materials.
- If you are going to use a spreadsheet BoM system, make sure you can also set up a system for managing changes. Revisions to ensure that the information is accurately updated through the process.
Because of these limitations, we do not want to advocate the use of BoM spreadsheets for every circumstance. However, the bill of materials template can be very useful when you want to do a quick solution.
Bill of Material Example
The LEGO Digital Designer software allows you to create virtual assemblies of LEGO bricks and then export the bill of materials to a spreadsheet. The software will automatically produce the assembly instructions. The purpose of the BoM is to help you acquire the needed pieces.
If your kids enjoy designing custom LEGO creations, you probably know that the main limitation is not having the right pieces. Although you can’t get every possible piece in whatever color you wish. It is pretty amazing how many pieces are available in the system.
Download and use Bills of Materials (BOM) Excel template
To use this free printable bills of materials excel template, you should have Microsoft Office/ Microsoft Excel installed in your system.
After installing Excel or Spreadsheet, download the zip file of this template, extract the template using WinRAR or 7Zip decompressing software.
Once extracted, you can open the file using Excel and start entering data or customizing the template. You can customize the currency, color scheme, fields in this excel template as per your requirement.
