A procedure-oriented generic bill of materials

Bill of Materials (BOM) structures describe the component structure of a product, most often as a tabular structure implemented within a relational database system. The conventional approach is to design a unique BOM for each model or variant of a product. This becomes impossible with a customer-oriented production, where the number of variants may go into high numbers. The solution is to describe and maintain one generic structure that encompasses all variants of a product. This structure may then be used to generate a BOM for each particular variant. Earlier attempts to develop a generic BOM system have been directed towards improving the conventional tabular structures.