Maintenance BOM Quality: Lessons Learned

When built with careful consideration, maintenance BOMs help improve wrench time and decrease downtime. Without maintenance BOMs, planners would have to find vendor maintenance documents or recommended spare parts lists to find parts, and this can take the time that would be better-used planning and scheduling work. There are various but equally important ways to improve maintenance BOM quality. Here are a few of the best strategies to increase their quality and usability. 

Accuracy, Obviously

Having accurate BOMs is the cornerstone of having effective maintenance bills of materials. Inaccurate BOMs are the most common result of errors – part of that problem is a lack of initiative to keep the information up to date over time. To make your BOMs as accurate as possible, avoiding human error will be a top priority. Having a singular and widely accessible bill of materials will see much more long-term accuracy than multiple spreadsheets across several locations.

Who’s Using the BOM? 

To create an effective BOM, it’s important to consider who will be viewing the BOM. In addition to inputting data without errors, use detailed and informative parts descriptions that allow easy identification and differentiation between parts. When doing so, keep things simple and easy to understand.  Ideally, adopt a taxonomy and cataloguing process for your materials.

Use Clear Visuals

Keeping your BOMs accurate also involves making them more intuitive to understand in the first place. By using exploded parts diagrams, workers can easily navigate between naming conventions and data with visuals, making projects and maintenance easier to plan. Providing vendor manuals linked to BOMs is also a good idea so that workers won’t waste time looking for them independently.

How We Can Help You

Are you looking to learn more about BOM quality and how to improve it? Contact us to watch a demo and learn more about how we can help enhance your BOMs.