Better BOMs Aren’t the Same as a Better Process

Walking into a company a few years after their ERP go-live, the first thing we heard was: the BOMs are much better than they used to be. That sounded like good news, for about ten minutes. Then we started asking questions.

A sharp cost accountant had been finding BOM errors and bouncing them back to engineering, who launched a cleanup effort — hundreds of corrections, real work, real results. The BOMs really were better. But the process that created the errors in the first place was unchanged: paper ECOs, manual BOM updates, no formal PDM system connecting engineering changes to the ERP. Just a faster, better-organized reaction to the same broken workflow.

They’d gotten good at finding errors. What they needed was a reason to find fewer of them. That’s the distinction most operations miss — everyone focuses on cleaning up bad data, but fewer people focus on why the bad data exists in the first place. Better accuracy is a cleanup win. Sustainable accuracy is a process win. Every BOM error eventually shows up somewhere: inventory, cost, planning, production, or customer deliveries. You don’t always know where or when, but it lands. The goal isn’t to get faster at corrections. It’s to need fewer of them.

Author Profile

Lee Stout