User guide

Creating BOMs
5-4: Creating and Updating BOMs
Creating BOMs
The whole point of creating a BOM is to generate a PCN telling other people
about it and to inform EDA to upload the BOM data into the SAP database.
You may create many BOMs, using
bn_bomprocess
,
mechbom
, or
xcelbom
,
but they’re only sets of potential input files that don’t have any effect until you run
bom_upload
to generate the PCN so EDA can upload the BOM data into the SAP
database (see Chapter 6).
Note:
The files generated by
bn_bomprocess
,
mechbom
, or
xcelbom
do create a ripple effect in
the versioning system that identifies different recent versions of your BOMs in your working
directory: only as many versions are kept as are specified in the BOM config file.
Structuring a BOM
Before you create an initial BOM, consider how best to organize the various
components that go into the project. Pertinent issues include how the product is
packaged for a customer, how it is debugged in the test lab, how it uses
subassemblies that may be available from other projects, how mechanical parts
and top-level assemblies should be organized, and so on.
For most of your purposes, Bay Networks’ established hierarchy of class codes
will be all that you need to structure a BOM. See
BOM Structures
on page E-9, for
the proper organization.
As listed in Table 3-1 (
Summary of Initial Parts to Take Out for a New Project
on
page 3-7), only half a dozen parts need to be taken out to start a new PCB project.
When you use
bom_upload
to upload the BOM that they comprise, you will
specify that they all report to the part whose number you created as belonging to
class code 920, and which you named
PCB_Assy
_
Project_Name
. (See
Getting the
PCN Number
on page 6-7.)