Building your bill of materials

A bill of materials, or BOM as it is commonly called, is essentially a list of products that are required to produce another product. You can think of it as the list of ingredients for a recipe. Odoo needs to know what materials are required for us to produce this Class of 2014 T-shirt product.

In complex products, a bill of materials can be nested. For example, it might take many products to make a subproduct and then several subproducts to make a final product.

Tip

Don't let nested BOMs intimidate you. Once you understand how a simple BOM is processed, you will more easily see how you can group parts together. Think about grouping more complex BOMs by assembly and work centers. This makes it easier to see your inventory in real time as BOMs can be processed at each stage of your operations, properly using up materials and creating finished subassemblies.

For our first bill of materials example, we will be keeping the bill of materials simple. We are just going...