Understand BOMs, configurators and identification
Understand — Configurable Products & Spare Parts.
Two problems live in this area and they look alike from the outside. A configurable product has no price until somebody has specified it. A spare part has no article number until somebody has identified it. Both fail in the same way — the buyer knows what they want and cannot express it in your vocabulary.
Read these three before you model anything. The first decides whether you need a configurator at all, which is the question most projects get wrong. The second explains the structure a machine has to have before a parts list can be navigated. The third is the one to read if you are building a spare parts shop: it sets out the five ways a buyer arrives and what each one costs you in data.
- Configurable products — Options, rules, constraints, and how a configuration becomes a price and an order line.
- Bills of material and assemblies — The structure that turns a machine into a list of orderable parts.
- How buyers identify a spare part — Machine, serial, drawing position, old part number — anything but your SKU.