A configurable bill of materials, almost always shortened to cBOM, is a parameterised parts list. It holds every component a product line can possibly use, and a rule library decides which ones are included for a given buyer’s spec. The buyer picks a 4 by 5 metre louvred pergola in anthracite with integrated lighting, the cBOM resolves down to the exact posts, beams, louvres, motor, wiring, and screws, and the priced PDF lands in the inbox before the buyer has closed the browser tab.
That is the technical idea. The reason it matters is not technical. Without a cBOM, the parts list for a customised product is built by a person, from memory, on a Sunday evening. That person is usually the most senior engineer or the founder, both of whom should be doing something else. With a cBOM wired to a configurator, the parts list is generated the moment the buyer commits to a configuration. The translation step disappears.
The bottleneck was never the shop floor. It was the day and a half between the salesperson writing the spec and the engineer turning it into a parts list. We deleted that step.
A configurator is what the buyer sees. A cBOM is what holds the configurator up. Speed-to-quote, the thing every customised-product Builder is chasing this year, is downstream of the data structure underneath, not the 3D viewer on top.
What a configurable BOM is#
A regular bill of materials is a fixed list. A pergola, a fridge, a printer all have a BOM. The BOM names the components, the quantities, and the part numbers. For a product with one variant, that is enough. Procurement runs from the BOM, the shop floor builds from the BOM, the cost of goods is computed from the BOM. The BOM does not change.
The moment the product gets customisable, the fixed BOM breaks. A pergola might have eight sizes, four post systems, three roof types, two motor options, and twelve finishes. Multiplied out, that is 2,304 possible variations. Nobody writes 2,304 fixed BOMs. So the parts list becomes implicit, sitting in someone’s head, reconstructed from memory every time a quote goes out.
A configurable BOM is what replaces that mental model. It contains every part the product line could use, organised so a rule library can resolve which parts belong to a specific build. Industry sometimes calls it a 150% BOM, because the unconfigured cBOM contains more parts than any one product variation will ever ship. The 150% is rough industry shorthand. The real number depends on how many optional sub-assemblies the product carries.
A few synonyms to clear out of the way. The same idea travels under different names depending on the industry and the ERP vendor: cBOM, 150% BOM, modular BOM, variant BOM, dynamic BOM. They all describe the same structure. The only term to be careful with is manufacturing BOM, which is a different cut of the data altogether: it is the BOM as the shop floor consumes it, after the cBOM has resolved.
What changes when the cBOM and the configurator share one source of truth#
Before, here is what Monday morning looks like on a customised-product line.
The inbox has twelve new inquiries from the weekend. Each one is a contact form: “interested in a louvred pergola, please send pricing.” A salesperson calls back, asks the buyer what they want, writes the sizes and finishes on a notepad, drives out to measure when needed, and emails an engineer with the spec. The engineer opens the parts catalogue, picks the components by memory, double-checks two compatibility rules, types the line items into a spreadsheet, multiplies the cost columns by the regional margin, and emails back. The salesperson formats the price, attaches a PDF brochure, and sends a quote to the buyer. By Thursday. Three of the twelve buyers have already signed with a faster competitor. The manual quoting errors that accumulate inside that loop are not a discipline problem, they are the predictable cost of holding a 2,000-variant rule library in someone’s head.
After, the configurator on the website lets the buyer build the pergola themselves. The cBOM resolves in real time. The price computes against the buyer’s region. A designed PDF, with the configured 3D render, the spec line by line, and the price, lands in the buyer’s inbox before they close the tab. The same configured spec writes into the CRM and, if the integration is wired, into the ERP. By the time the salesperson opens Monday’s inbox, they are calling buyers who have already designed the pergola they want and seen the price. The day and a half of translation work is gone.
- €133M in quotes generated Hrovat (Slovenia, garden rooms); 415% more inquiries through the configurator over 30 months.
- 166 hours saved across 4 months YourPergola (Hungary, louvred pergolas); 331 quotes auto-generated across the same period.
- 508 leads in 90 days Caribbean Blinds (UK, pergolas); 40 percent of inquiries arrive as configured 3D quotes.
- 1–10 Days to launch Premade visual sales system for a known category, with the cBOM already wired.
Named numbers and the full stories live in the case studies.
The numbers above are public. The full stories sit in the Hrovat, YourPergola, and Caribbean Blinds case studies. The pattern is consistent across all three: the buyer-facing configurator gets the headlines, but the cBOM is what makes the headlines possible. Without the resolved BOM in real time, the configurator is a 3D viewer that hands the pricing problem back to a salesperson on a Sunday evening.
The four jobs a real cBOM has to handle#
Most teams who get burned on a cBOM project miscount the work. They scope the parts catalogue and stop. The parts catalogue is roughly a quarter of the project. The other three jobs are where good cBOM projects beat bad ones.
The parts catalogue. Every component, every variant, with the right part numbers, the right supplier links, the right unit costs, and the right inventory codes. This is the boring half of the work and the part people remember to scope. Pulling it out of the engineer’s head and into a structured catalogue is harder than it sounds, because half of the “obvious” rules (“we only use the 80 by 80 post above 4 metres of span”) are tribal knowledge that nobody has written down.
The rule library. What configurations are valid. Which roof type is compatible with which post height. Which screen colour is allowed when the structure is anthracite. Which size needs reinforcement. Which accessory is incompatible with which beam. Which markets allow which finishes under which regulations. The rule library is the soul of the cBOM. A wrong rule produces a configured spec that cannot be built, which is worse than no spec at all because the buyer has now signed for something the installer cannot deliver. This is the part to model with engineering and production teams in the same room, not the salesperson alone.
The pricing engine. Cost of goods from the resolved BOM, plus the margin rules, plus the regional modifiers, plus installation, plus any account-specific discount tiers, plus VAT. The pricing engine is the engine the configurator quietly relies on. A cBOM with no pricing engine is a parts list with no price tag, which the salesperson still has to translate by hand. The two have to be wired together or the cBOM is doing half the job.
The ERP handoff. The resolved BOM has to land in the ERP without anyone copying it. The configured spec, the priced lines, the inventory codes, the regional flags. When the buyer signs, the resolved BOM writes into the ERP, procurement triggers, the shop-floor job is scheduled, and the installer’s calendar updates. If the handoff is manual, the cBOM has compressed the front office while the back office is still doing the translation step on a Wednesday afternoon. That is half a project, not a finished one.
By Monday morning, 40 percent of our inquiries already came in as configured 3D quotes. The first conversation was different from day one.
The technology to build all four blocks stopped being the hard part a long time ago. The hard part is the rule library inside block two, and the integration in block four. Those are where good cBOM projects beat bad ones, and where vendors either know your category already or quietly hand the work back to you.
Five places static BOMs quietly leak margin#
Static BOMs do not look broken until you count where the margin goes.
- 01
Wrong-part orders
An installer turns up to a job with the wrong post height or the wrong screen colour. The cause is almost always a translation error between the salesperson's spec and the engineer's BOM. A resolved cBOM removes the second translation, so the part that ships is the part the buyer signed for.
- 02
Quote drift
The salesperson quotes a margin the cBOM would never approve, because the cost rules live in someone's head and not in the parts catalogue. The deal closes at a loss. With a wired cBOM, the configurator cannot quote outside the rule library.
- 03
Stale catalogues
A supplier raises a component price, the procurement team updates the catalogue, the sales team keeps quoting last quarter's number for the rest of the year. A centralised cBOM means the price change ripples to every configurator and every region within hours.
- 04
Rework hours
Half the engineering team's week is rebuilding parts lists from quote PDFs, because the quote and the BOM live in different tools. Those hours are pure deadweight. Wired correctly, the configured spec is the BOM. The rebuild step disappears.
- 05
Lost weekend leads
Monday is when most customised-product quote loops start. Friday afternoon inquiries sit in an inbox for 60 hours before anyone reads them. A configurator with a real cBOM behind it is open on Saturday at 11pm. The buyer can be 20 minutes into a designed pergola before the salesperson has had a coffee on Monday morning.
None of these failures look catastrophic on their own. Cumulatively, on a customised-product line running 200 quotes a month, they compound into the difference between a profitable Q3 and a flat one. The team that fixed them, Mizarstvo Hrovat, did it by moving the entire customised-product line, garden rooms and modular houses, onto a single configurator wired to a single cBOM, and watching €133M of quotes go out across Slovenia and the DACH market in 30 months. The numbers are not magic. They are what happens when the translation step is removed and the configurator inherits the production team’s actual rules instead of approximating them on a notepad.
When a configurable BOM is not worth building yet#
Three honest cases where the work does not pay off.
The product is a fresh CAD drawing every time. If every order is a one-off architectural piece with no reusable components, a cBOM is the wrong shape for the problem. A cBOM works because most “custom” products are actually parameterised, and the parameter space is finite. A truly bespoke product is closer to project management than configuration. The right tool there is a quoting workflow with an engineer in the loop, not a configurator with no rule library.
The AOV is under 5,000 euros. Below that line, the unit economics for any kind of instrumented configurator get tight, because the project cost has to amortise across closed deals. Above it, and especially in the 8,000 to 35,000 euro range that outdoor living and modular construction sit in, the cBOM funds itself inside the first quarter. This is roughly the same threshold that decides whether made-to-order manufacturing is worth instrumenting at all.
The product line is brand new and changing weekly. Building a rule library against a product that is still in pre-launch iteration is a way to spend a quarter writing rules that get binned in week two of the actual launch. Wait until the product line stabilises. A cBOM is a lever for a known category, not a way to design the category itself.
For the categories that survive those three filters, which is most of outdoor living and most of modular construction, the cBOM is the difference between a 3-day quote and a 90-second one. The configurators we ship at SaleSqueze are built around cBOMs that already know what a louvred pergola, a garden room, a carport, or a louvred awning actually is, which is why the launch timeline is in days, not months.
The line to take home#
A configurable BOM is a tool. The reason to build one is not because BOMs sound interesting. It is because the day and a half between a customer asking for a quote and a salesperson sending one is the difference between a closed deal and a missed one, on every customised product, in every market, every week. The cBOM is what closes that gap.
If you are sizing up where to start, the practical first step is not the cBOM itself. It is the 3D configurator and the pricing engine the cBOM has to feed, because those are the surfaces that earn buyer attention. The cBOM is the spine underneath, the part the BOM generator actually resolves at quote time. Build the surfaces first, wire the cBOM in week two, and let the engineering team meet the configured spec instead of rewriting it on a Wednesday afternoon.
People also ask.
What is a configurable BOM?
A configurable bill of materials, often called a cBOM or a 150% BOM, is a parameterised parts list. It holds every component a product line can use, and a rule library decides which ones are included for a given buyer's spec. A buyer picks a 4 by 5 metre louvred pergola in anthracite with integrated lighting, and the cBOM resolves to the exact posts, beams, louvres, motor, wiring, and screws for that build. Without one, every customised order needs an engineer to translate the spec by hand.
Why is a configurable BOM called a 150% BOM?
Because, unconfigured, it contains more parts than any single product variation will ever use. It is the full universe of components the product line can include. The 150% is a rough industry shorthand, not a literal number. When the configurator resolves the spec for one buyer, the cBOM collapses down to a 100% BOM, which is the exact parts list for that single product.
What is the difference between a configurable BOM and a regular BOM?
A regular BOM is a fixed parts list for one specific product variation. It does not change. A configurable BOM is a parameterised structure that can produce thousands of regular BOMs, one per buyer-specific configuration. Regular BOMs work for products with a small number of fixed variants. Configurable BOMs are needed when the product is made-to-order and the buyer can combine sizes, finishes, accessories, and options into a unique build.
How does a configurable BOM connect to a configurator?
The configurator is the buyer-facing layer. The cBOM is the data structure underneath. When the buyer changes the roof type or the post height, the configurator queries the rule library, the cBOM resolves the affected components, and the pricing engine recomputes the total. The same configured spec becomes the priced PDF, the CRM record, and the cut list on the shop floor. One source of truth, three downstream artefacts.
How does a configurable BOM speed up quoting?
Manual quoting on a customised product means an engineer reads the spec, opens the parts catalogue, picks the components by hand, checks the compatibility rules from memory, and writes the price into a spreadsheet. That is a 1 to 3 day loop per quote. A configurable BOM wired to a configurator collapses the loop to seconds, because the configurator is reading the cBOM in real time. The wait that used to lose deals disappears.
Does a configurable BOM replace ERP?
No. The cBOM lives upstream of the ERP. The configurator resolves the cBOM into a specific BOM for one order, then the ERP picks up that resolved BOM and runs procurement, scheduling, and shop-floor jobs from it. The relationship is feeder and consumer. A good integration writes the resolved BOM into the ERP automatically when the order is signed, so production starts the same day.
How long does it take to build a configurable BOM?
For a premade product category, like louvred pergolas or carports, the cBOM is already wired in the visual sales system and goes live in 1 to 10 days. For a custom product line with a unique parts catalogue and unusual rules, a real cBOM takes a quarter or more of engineering time. The split depends on whether the vendor already knows the category. Generic 3D configurator vendors start from zero on every project, which is where the 3 to 6 month timelines come from.
What happens if the rule library inside the configurable BOM is wrong?
A wrong rule produces a configured spec that cannot actually be built. The buyer signs, the PDF lands in the CRM, and the installer turns up on site to a part that does not exist or a combination that does not fit. The most common failure mode in real cBOM projects is not the technology, it is the rule library being written in a hurry or by someone who does not know the shop floor. The fix is to model the rules with the engineering and production teams in the same room, not with the salesperson alone.
