REAV

Glossary

BOM

Bill of Materials

The structured list of components that make up an item - read forwards in manufacturing, and backwards in dismantling.

In manufacturing a BOM is a recipe: to build one unit, consume these components in these quantities. It drives purchasing, costing and production planning, and it is known before the work starts.

Repair uses it differently. The question is not what to consume to build a device but which part fits this specific unit, which is a compatibility question across model variants, revisions and production years. The same visual part number is not always the same part.

Dismantling inverts it completely. One device is consumed and several usable parts are produced, each of which enters stock without a purchase price and with a provenance worth keeping. A standard BOM structure has no natural place for that direction of flow.

Getting this right is what lets an operation answer two questions that decide margin: whether a given repair is worth doing at the parts cost it implies, and which devices are worth dismantling for the parts the current repair queue is waiting on.

Parts, compatibility and dismantling on one thread

Related terms

  • Parts harvesting Recovering working components from devices that cannot be economically repaired, to supply the repair of others.
  • WMS The system that knows where physical items are inside a building and directs the movements between those locations.
  • MES vs ERP Two layers of software that are often confused: the ERP plans and accounts for the business, the MES runs and records what happens on the shop floor.
  • Repair yield The share of devices entering a workshop that leave it working and saleable, instead of being scrapped or harvested for parts.

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