A network perspective for the analysis of bill of materials

A Bill of Materials, or Product Structure, is a diagram that lists all the components, intermediate assemblies, sub-components and parts necessary to produce one unit of a finished product, or end part. It is represented as a tree structure with hierarchical relationships among diverse components and materials. The aim of this paper is to propose two procedures to convert single and multiple bills of materials into networks. These procedures exploit the potentialities of network analysis, offering new viewpoints in terms of representation and extractable informative content, and hence attaining insights into the criticality's of parts and components. Throughout the paper, some network measures are described in terms of practical implications in industrial management, such as product functional design and variety reduction programs.