A BOM explosion answers the question: What is the product made of? This question arises in various situations, such as when you want to:

• Determine material requirements for a product
• Look at the overall structure of a product in a design department
• See an overview of the parts and materials required
• Calculate the effects of changes to costs

When you explode a BOM "top down", the system finds all the components that are in the BOM. Some individual components may also be assemblies. These subordinate BOMs are included in reporting functions. There is no limit to the number of levels of BOMs you can have.

You can use selection criteria to either include additional information or restrict the list displayed, so you can define precisely how you want to explode a BOM.

The BOM explosion is available to you for the following BOM types:

• Material BOMs
• Order BOMs

• Work breakdown structure BOMs

For each individual BOM type various reporting functions are available:

• For the structural explosion:

• BOM level by level
• Multi-level BOM

• The summarized BOM function is a quantity-based reporting function.