Supply Chain BOM Explosion, Cost Rollup, and Supplier Risk¶
Industry: Manufacturing / Aerospace / Automotive | Role: VP Supply Chain, Director of Procurement | Time to value: 3-5 hours
The Problem¶
A finished product contains hundreds of subassemblies, each with its own bill of materials. Rolling up total landed cost across a 6-level BOM is error-prone. Identifying which suppliers represent single points of failure requires cross-referencing supplier records against every level of the hierarchy. When a supplier goes down, the question "what finished goods are affected?" takes days to answer.
The Traditional Approach¶
Teams export BOM data from the ERP system into spreadsheets, then write custom scripts -- typically 1,500-3,000 lines of SQL and Python -- to recursively explode assemblies and aggregate costs. Supplier risk analysis lives in a separate tool or a second set of spreadsheets maintained by procurement. Reconciling the two requires manual joins and is usually done quarterly. A single BOM change means re-running the entire pipeline.
With Uni¶
Recursive graph queries traverse the full assembly hierarchy in one pass, from finished goods down to raw materials. Cost rollup aggregates part costs across every level automatically. Supplier risk analysis ranks each supplier by how many finished products depend on it, identifying the vendors whose failure would affect the most goods. All three analyses -- BOM explosion, cost rollup, and supplier risk -- run from the same data and the same query layer.
What You'll See¶
- Complete multi-level BOM listing with each part's cost and the total rolled-up cost per product
- Total BOM cost per product, summing part costs across all assembly levels (Smartphone X $175.13, TabletPro 10 $165.13)
- Identification of risk-exposed suppliers: which suppliers are critical to the most finished products, and which goods they affect
Why It Matters¶
Quarterly BOM reconciliation becomes on-demand. When a supplier disruption hits, the impact assessment that used to take a procurement team 2-3 days is available in seconds -- with the full chain of evidence from raw material to finished good.