Products, Components & BOM
Product
A Product is the finished item you sell or produce — the thing that appears on an invoice or in your catalog.
Component
A Component represents a physical part used to build one or more Products. A Component is not tied to a single Product — it’s the thing itself, independent of which finished items happen to use it.
Components can be shared
If Product A and Product B both use the same Component, they are referencing the same Component record — not two separate copies. This means:
- Its Production Profiles (how it’s printed) are shared between both Products.
- Changing that Component’s production configuration — renaming a Profile, adjusting yield, deleting or archiving a Profile — affects every Product that uses it, not just the one you happen to have open.
This is intentional: if two Products genuinely need the same physical part, sharing one Component means you configure production for it once, and both Products benefit from any correction or improvement.
Where this matters in the interface: a Component’s BOM row shows a small “Shared by N products” indicator whenever it’s used by more than one Product, so this shared impact is never a surprise.
When Components should NOT be shared
If two Products need what looks like a similar part but actually requires genuinely different production configuration that shouldn’t be linked — different print settings that must be free to diverge independently — they should use two separate Components, not one shared one. Components are for parts that really are the same physical thing.
Product BOM (Bill of Materials)
The BOM defines, for a given Product:
- which Components it needs, and
- how many units of each Component are required per finished Product.
This “how many per Product” number is what the interface labels “Per product ×N” — it belongs to the BOM relationship between a Product and a Component, not to the Component itself (the same Component can require a different quantity in a different Product’s BOM).
Removing a Component from a Product
Removing a Component from Product A’s BOM only removes Product A’s relationship to that Component. If the Component is shared, Product B’s BOM is untouched — the Component itself survives and remains fully available to every other Product still using it.
This is a deliberately different action from Production Profile changes:
| Action | Scope |
|---|---|
| Remove Component from a Product’s BOM | This Product only |
| Delete / Archive / edit a Production Profile | The shared Component, and therefore every Product using it |
See Production Profiles for what happens when a Component’s production configuration is deleted, archived, or edited.
Archived Components
A Component may be archived rather than permanently deleted when historical data needs to be preserved — for example, when it has real production history.
Archived Components can still appear when linking an existing Component to a Product (the “Link Existing” flow), clearly marked with an Archived badge. Selecting an archived Component there:
- reactivates the Component, and
- links it to the Product you’re editing.
Reactivating a Component does not automatically reactivate its Production Profiles. Any Production Profiles that were individually archived stay archived until you explicitly reactivate each one — see Production Profiles.