Visualizing and structuring complex bills of materials: a framework for enhanced engineering operations in custom manufacturing

Custom manufacturers of engineered products face growing challenges in managing complex and variant Bills of Materials (BOMs). This paper proposes a visualization-driven framework for structuring and analyzing overcomplete (150%) BOMs in Engineer-to-Order environments. The framework integrates configurator rule logic, generic BOM structures, and metadata to enable explicit traceability and diagnostic analysis of variant-specific BOMs. A proof-of-concept prototype evaluated in a European fibre-laser manufacturer demonstrates support for variant validation, error detection, and alignment.