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We recently posted a new article on our website that has a number of useful suggestions for companies that use Excel to manage their bills of materials (BOMs). Following these recommendations will set you up for a faster, smoother and cleaner transition when you’re ready to move to an automated BOM management system (yes, full disclosure, like Arena), but they’ll also help you NOW—and for as long as you continue to use Excel for BOM management.

Here they are at a high level:

1. Be consistent. Use the same columns in the same order in every Excel bill of materials. Use a standard format for part numbers, manufacturer names, file titles and other types of data.
2. Use standard templates. Get in the habit of hiding (not deleting) columns that aren’t needed in a particular BOM and creating separate spreadsheets for doing analyses that require additional columns. Give each column a single purpose, and label every piece of data in your Excel BOM spreadsheet.
3. Have part numbering and part naming conventions – and a single location to store them. Develop and document a standard way to number and name ALL parts, and then manage those part numbers and names in a single location, like an item master or master parts list.
4. Minimize repeated data. Include only as much data as is needed for each BOM to perform its core function of capturing the relationships between parts and assemblies. Store additional part data in the item master instead of multiple Excel BOMs, so updates only need to be made in one place.

Following these suggestions will help reduce confusion, duplication and errors in your Excel spreadsheet BOMs. For more details, read the full article and be sure to look for the free downloads at the end – you’ll find several Excel BOM templates and examples that can be adapted for your organization’s use.

Further reading:

• Using Excel for Bill of Materials Management
• Arena Dispatches: The Excel Series

If you’re like me, this holiday season you spent a lot of time at parties answering the inevitable “so what do you do?” question. Here at Arena we make a software tool for collaboratively managing BOMs and changes and sharing product information with the supply chain. While that’s simple to understand for someone who knows manufacturing, it’s not obvious to someone who doesn’t. When I break it down and start explaining that our software manages bills of materials, the next step of course is to define what BOMs are. And for that, I always try to have a good analogy on hand.

Over the years I’ve tried out many iterations of the BOM analogy but my favorite at the moment is the bill of materials as recipe and shopping list for a manufactured product. The BOM lists the quantity of the parts that go into making the product (the shopping list) and how the parts go together to make up the product’s major components (the recipe). Some people get it, but most give me a blank stare and nod their heads pretending to understand.

So help me out…do you have a better analogy? How do you explain the concept of a bill of materials to people who don’t work in manufacturing?