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.

Inventory is one of the places every one of those BOM errors eventually lands. If you want to fix the root causes instead of just cleaning up after them, see what fixing the root causes of inventory drift actually looks like.

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Lee Stout