Excel spreadsheets might seem like a simple solution for managing bills of materials, but they quickly become a costly liability as your product complexity grows. Here's why professional PLM software is essential for accurate, efficient BOM management.

Are you finding Excel bill of materials spreadsheets too painful?

New companies often begin their path to product lifecycle management software by looking for Excel bill of material spreadsheets. These BOM spreadsheet templates are easy to create, and can be useful for a short period.

However, after you have several Excel BOM spreadsheets, you'll begin to see the complexity and expense of maintaining them. And the risk of costly production errors rises significantly as your collection of bill of materials spreadsheets grows.

Managing multi-level indented Excel BOMs is virtually impossible

Multi-level BOMs are incredibly useful, but Excel fights you at every step. For example, consider an automobile's electric window motor assembly, common to 4 door locations. Listing these motor assemblies within the complete product structure requires you to manage 4 identical lists, one for each door assembly. And if the motor assembly has subassemblies, or is used across many products, imagine the time and effort wasted in finding and updating a single component.

Design files? Revision control? Not in Excel!

If you're using Excel to calculate product cost roll-ups, it's not easy maintaining part unit costs except for very basic assemblies. And it's essentially impossible to record substance content for RoHS and WEEE material declaration reporting. Excel simply can't structure the detailed data that should be associated with each part.

Specialized bill of materials capabilities in PDXpert PLM software

"PDXpert makes finding the interrelationship between all of our parts effortless, including our Suppliers' part numbers."

PDXpert PLM software is specifically designed to avoid the time, effort and errors of Excel BOM spreadsheets.

Let PDXpert PLM software replace your Excel bill of material spreadsheets

PDXpert PLM has been specifically designed for smaller organizations making the transition to automated product structure management. It's easy for users to find their items using free-form text search, then create complex products by simple drag-and-drop BOM construction.