Professional development/Project management/Purchasing Guide

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Building a bill of materials (BOM)

Your project BOM will include all components necessary to build your final product. You won't be able to do this properly without a good detailed design so that you don't miss any parts. Based on that list you will be able to tally your total product cost.

Bill of materials

The most efficient way of compiling your BOM is in a tabular format. Here are the columns that should be included with a few examples of items:

Item name Description Units of measure Quantity

List of equipment

You may have other items that are necessary to test your different prototypes however. For example you may need a breadboard to test a prototype but that will not be included in the final product, the breadboard would then be included in your list of equipment but not your bill of materials.

  1. Don't forget to add links to each item
  2. Don't forget the taxes
  3. Don't forget the shipping cost
  4. Don't forget to include costs of 3D printing or laser cutting materials, estimates can be found from https://makerepo.com/print_orders/index_new

Spending your Project Budget

  1. Before anything is bought by your team, a PM or TA must approve it.
  2. When reviewing BOMs always check for:
    1. Complete list of parts, this should be representative of the designs and include fasteners and wire and everything else.
    2. Shipping and tax costs, duties can be expensive so try to buy things from Canada.
    3. If a cheaper or better alternative exists.
    4. If a cheaper supplier exists.
  3. When looking for places to find parts, here is the order of places to look:
    1. In the Makerlab (cost included in BOM).
    2. In the Makerstore (cost included in BOM).
    3. Online or local stores, some common places are below.

Online and Local Stores

General

Mechanical/hardware

Electrical/robotics