Science & Industry

A Bill of Materials (BOM) is a hierarchical list of materials involved in the production of something. Here's a simplified example of 5 BOMs:

Toast:
-Sliced Bread
-Butter

Sliced Bread:
-Bread

Bread:
-Water
-Flour

Flour:
-Wheat

Butter:
-Milk
-Salt

Typically the above list would have quantities on each of those items, so a sandwich would say 2 slices of bread but one slice of tomato or something. So you can see how you can make a hierarchy out of the above examples, going from Wheat, Milk and Salt to Toast and looking at each element on the way.

This has lots of potential applications in eve and life, but I can't find the software that can make a hierarchical system like this for free. Something where you can say: "I want 4 slices of toast" and it'll tell you how much water you need to make the toast, or you can say something like: "I have 40kg of salt, infinite water, 5kg of flour, and 24L of milk, how much toast can I make? Anyone know of any good free BOM software out there? It doesn't have to be extremely complicated. I don't know if a typical BOM system would have some way of accounting for the cost of processes involved in the production of something (electricity to heat oven for bread, or amortization of oven or whatever). That would be nice but not 100% required.

edit: tried to google for that s/w in the past but couldn't get anything. :(

I find that excel is really hard to set up stuff like this. I end up doing things like having an extra column to multiply stuff in, etc. :(

Also what if you have something like salt, which is included in both bread and butter. I think excel suffers when looking at those relationships etc. I'm pretty sure you need a relational DB to set these things up. I know that you can theoretically hard code a relational db (which is what you were trying to do above, right?) but it's so much hassle vs just using something higher-level.

you don't really need a relational database.

all you are doing is mapping out the flow of materials.

you will need extra columns to hold values and calculations in, if they present too much visual clutter you can always hide them once set up.

In the scenario where you are trying to build a shopping list for an end product, e.g. I want to make 10 toast, how much salt will I need, it is actually quite straightforward in excel.

The reverse scenario where you say I have 100 salt, what can I make, will require a bit more though, but should also be quite doable.

I was hoping to make a chart that went from moon goo to t2 stuff to try to maybe build a model of the economy in terms of what happens to prices when adjustments are made in different areas, or to anticipate the demand for something, or whatever. Obviously there are lots of uses for it, but moon goo was my focus. Even just trying to reduce all the high end stuff to their equivalent low end stuff is a huge pita in excel.

I wanted to pull levers at the very top and watch the numbers shift on the bottom.

EVE MEEP can and does have a BOM system, which allows you to decide to what level you want to get to, i.e. the components, or the minerals needed for the components or whatever.


I would like it if it had more granularity (right now if you have multiple components, you cannot decide the status of each individual component, either you stop at the component level for everything, or you go down to the mineral level for everything).


Would be great if there was a real BOM system for EVE out there - if someone finds it I'd be really interested.