The #1 fashion PLM for apparel Bill of Materials, inventory, and warehouse tracking. Effortlessly manage every fabric, trim, and labor detail with built-in warehouse management (WMS) for your warehouse. Gain full visibility and control with material lot, roll, and location tracking—built for modern apparel brands.
A BOM is the list of everything it takes to make one style: fabric, trims and labor, with quantities and costs. Get it right and you know your margin before you cut. AIMS360 keeps the BOM on the style record and uses it to drive costing, raw material purchasing and cut tickets, so the recipe and the production stay connected.
The bill of materials is the recipe for one style: every fabric, trim and labor operation needed to make it, with quantities and costs. For a woven shirt that means the shell fabric and how many yards each garment consumes, the buttons, interlining, labels, thread, hangtag and polybag, and the cutting and sewing operations, each carrying a cost.
Add the lines together and you have what the style costs to make, before freight and duty. That is why the BOM matters more than most documents in the building: your selling price is set in a meeting, but your cost is set here, line by line. In AIMS360 the BOM lives with the style in Production (PLM), and everything that spends money on that style reads from it.
They travel together and get mixed up constantly. The split is simple.
Measurements, construction details, stitch types, artwork and placement. It is the instruction sheet a factory builds the garment from. If the collar is wrong, the tech pack is where you look.
Materials, quantities and labor, each with a cost. It is the document your costing and purchasing run on. If the margin is wrong, the BOM is where you look.
In AIMS360 both live on the style record, so the person answering a factory question and the person answering a margin question are looking at the same style, not two copies of it.
Each fabric and how much of it one garment uses. Consumption is where costing lives or dies: a marker that yields a few percent worse than planned changes the cost of every unit in every colorway.
Buttons, zippers, interlinings, labels, thread, hangtags, polybags. Individually they cost cents. A style usually carries a dozen or more, and forgetting one does not make it free, it just makes your cost sheet wrong.
Cutting, sewing, washing, finishing, whether done in your own shop or priced per operation by a contractor. Labor is often the biggest single line and the one that changes most between costing and reality.
Fabric plus trims plus labor is the style's cost before freight and duty. Set the wholesale price against it and you have margin. Everything the sales team negotiates later sits on top of this number.
No single line on a BOM looks important. The season makes it important.
| The error on paper | Across a 5,000 unit season |
|---|---|
| Thread undercounted by $0.04 | $200 gone, invisible until year end |
| Fabric consumption off by 5% | Every colorway costed wrong, and a fabric shortage mid production |
| One trim left off the BOM | A rush order at spot price, plus air freight if the line is waiting |
| Labor rate from last season | Margin quoted to the buyer that the factory invoice quietly disproves |
The figures above are arithmetic, not customer data, and that is the point: none of them need bad luck to happen, only a recipe that drifted from reality. The BOM is where those errors get caught while they are still cheap to fix.
The style's cost rolls up from its components. When a fabric price changes or a contractor's rate moves, the cost sheet follows, because it is calculated from the BOM rather than typed in beside it. Costing a new colorway or a revised version of last season's body starts from the existing recipe instead of a blank spreadsheet.
For configured products built from components, each configuration rolls up its own cost and margin. And once the cost is real, pricing becomes a decision instead of a guess: our pricing and margin calculator shows how cost, wholesale and retail relate, and the weighted average cost method explains how AIMS360 values the inventory those BOMs produce.
A BOM that only lives in a spreadsheet stops working the day production starts. In AIMS360 it is the first link in the production chain.
Raw material requirements come from the recipe times the plan. Fabric and trim purchase orders are raised against real consumption, not a guess, through vendor POs.
Fabric and trims are received as inventory in their own right, tracked by lot, roll and warehouse location, so what purchasing bought and what the floor can actually use are the same number.
The cut ticket knows what production will consume because the BOM told it. Issue fabric to the cut and the system relieves the exact rolls and lots used.
Work moves to contractors and through work in process with production process tracking, so you can see where every cut is without calling anyone.
Completed units arrive in finished goods inventory carrying the cost the BOM built. The recipe and the reality stayed connected the whole way, which is the entire point.
Products assembled from components, like golf clubs configured by flex, hand, loft, shaft and grip, run the same way: the BOM drives assembly orders and factory purchase orders, and each configuration rolls up its own cost.
Most systems treat fabric as a note. AIMS360 treats it as inventory. Materials are tracked by lot, roll and warehouse location with built-in warehouse management, so you know which rolls exist, where they sit, and what production consumed.
That matters in apparel specifically because fabric is not interchangeable the way screws are. Dye lots shade differently, and a garment cut from two lots shows it. Tracking at the roll and lot level is what lets a cut ticket pull matching lots, and what tells you honestly how much usable fabric is left rather than how much was bought.
Not every apparel business does, and pretending otherwise sells software, not results. It depends on your business model.
The BOM is essential. You own the materials and the make, so costing, purchasing and cut tickets all hang off the recipe. This is the center of the manufacturer business model.
You need a BOM even if you never touch a sewing machine. Components are inventory, assembly orders are driven from the recipe, and every configuration has its own cost.
Usually no BOM is required. You buy the finished product at an agreed price, and your cost work happens in the purchase order and landed cost instead. That flow is covered on the importer business model page.
Plenty of brands import their core program and produce a domestic capsule or chase styles locally. In AIMS360 the imported styles run on POs and landed cost while the produced styles carry BOMs, in the same system, with one inventory.
What apparel brands and manufacturers ask about the bill of materials.
The recipe for one style: every fabric, trim and labor operation needed to make it, with quantities and costs. In AIMS360 the BOM lives with the style and drives costing, raw material purchasing and the production paperwork that follows.
A tech pack tells the factory how to build the garment: measurements, construction, artwork, placement. The BOM tells you what it takes and what it costs: materials, quantities, labor. They are related and often travel together, but the BOM is the one your costing and purchasing run on.
Fabric with consumption per garment, every trim from buttons and zippers to labels, thread, hangtags and polybags, and the labor operations, each with a cost. Added together they are the style's cost before freight and duty, which is why the BOM is where margin is really decided.
Multiplication. A few cents of thread miscounted is invisible on one sample and real money across a five thousand unit season. Fabric yield off by a few percent changes the cost of every colorway. The BOM is where those errors get caught while they are still cheap to fix.
The style's cost rolls up from its components, so when a fabric price or a labor rate changes, the cost sheet follows. For configured products built from components, each configuration rolls up its own cost and margin.
The BOM tells purchasing which raw materials to order and tells the cut ticket what production will consume. From there AIMS360 links raw materials, cut tickets, contractors and work in process through to finished goods inventory, so the recipe and the reality stay connected.
Usually not for full-package goods: when you buy the finished product from a factory at an agreed price, no bill of materials is required, and your cost work happens in the purchase order and landed cost instead. You need a BOM when you own the materials, make the goods yourself or through contractors, or configure products from components.
Raw materials are inventory in their own right. AIMS360 tracks materials by lot, roll and warehouse location with built-in warehouse management, so you know which rolls exist, where they sit, and what production consumed.
Yes. Products assembled from components, like golf clubs configured by flex, hand, loft, shaft and grip, carry a bill of materials, their components are tracked as inventory, and assembly orders and factory purchase orders are driven from the BOM, with each configuration rolling up its own cost.
In Production (PLM), on the style record, alongside tech packs and costing, and connected to vendor purchase orders, cut tickets and work in process. One record, referenced by everything that spends money on the style.
Last reviewed 10 August 2026 by the AIMS360 team. The definition of a bill of materials and the fabric, trim and labor structure described here are standard apparel industry practice. AIMS360 capabilities described, including BOMs on the style record, material lot, roll and location tracking with built-in warehouse management, and BOM driven costing, cut tickets and purchase orders, reflect the platform as published on aims360.com. The season math in the errors table is illustrative arithmetic, not customer data. Whether your business needs a BOM depends on your business model, as covered above.
Bring one of your own styles to a 30 minute demo and watch the BOM build its cost sheet, its material buy and its cut ticket from one record.
