BOM Review Gets Its First AI Check Card: General BOM Health

BOM Review started with a simple premise: catch data problems before they travel downstream to purchasing, manufacturing, and release. The deterministic check cards we shipped in July do exactly that. Part Number, Property, and Structure checks run the same way every time and tell you exactly which rule was violated.

But every engineering manager knows there is a second category of BOM problems. Nothing is technically missing. No rule is broken. And still, an experienced engineer looking at the BOM would raise an eyebrow. Three nearly identical fastener variants scattered across one assembly. A component with a lead time that will blow up the build schedule. A BOM with no revision-tracking column at all. These are not rule violations. They are judgment calls.

Today, BOM Review takes its first step into that territory with General BOM Health, an AI-powered check card that is now part of the BOM Review experience.

The AI Reads Your BOM the Way an Experienced Engineer Would

General BOM Health goes beyond the deterministic checks already available in BOM Review. Instead of checking for missing values or structural errors against fixed rules, the AI reasons over the actual content of your BOM and surfaces the kinds of issues an experienced engineer would catch on a careful read-through.

Here are examples of what the AI BOM Health card can surface: similar or near-duplicate parts that could be consolidated, components with unusually long lead times worth flagging before a build, missing data-hygiene columns such as a BOM with no revision tracking, and other general BOM health observations that do not map to a fixed rule but are still useful signals for your team.

One design decision matters here. AI findings are always surfaced as informational insights, never as Errors or Warnings. Deterministic checks verify. The AI observes and suggests. A human decides what to do with each observation. We think this honesty about the difference between rule-based validation and AI judgment is essential for trust.

Auto Review panel with AI BOM Health card alongside Part Number, Property, and Structure cards]

The Same Review Experience Your Team Already Knows

The AI card sits right alongside the existing Part Number, Property, and Structure check cards. There is no separate workflow to learn. Findings can be navigated with the eye icon to jump directly to the affected cell, or turned into a task the same way as any other BOM Review finding. Even if the finding is in a lower-level BOM, OpenBOM takes you directly there.

For larger multi-level BOM structures, the AI evaluates each BOM in the tree and streams results back progressively. You start seeing insights for the parts of your structure that finish first rather than waiting on the whole tree at once.

AI finding converted into a comment with an assigned task]

Why We Did It

The value of a BOM review is not only the corrected BOM. It is the judgment applied during the review. Until now, that judgment lived exclusively in the heads of your most experienced people, and it was applied only when they had time to do a careful read-through. Most teams do not have that time before every handoff.

General BOM Health gives every review cycle a first pass of experienced-engineer-style observations, automatically, so your team spends its attention deciding what to do about findings rather than hunting for them. Combined with the deterministic cards, you now get both layers of a real review: exact rule validation and content-level judgment. And because findings become comments and tasks inside the same collaborative workspace, the reasoning behind each decision is captured rather than lost. That is the Product Memory idea working in practice.

How It Works

1. Open a BOM workspace with a BOM you want to check.
2. BOM Review toolbar is available on the top 
3. Click Run to start BOM Review as usual. No separate step is needed for the AI card.
4. When the review completes, look for the General BOM Health card alongside the other check cards.
5. Expand the card to see BOM Review results in a separate browser.
6. Use the eye icon to jump to a specific cell, or create a task to follow up on a finding.

AI BOM Health is available as part of an AI subscription add-on. Teams without the add-on will see the card with a short explanation and a link to get in touch about enabling it, without any disruption to the rest of BOM Review. This is the first AI-powered check card in BOM Review, and we plan to keep expanding what AI-backed checks can look for as the feature matures.

What is the AI BOM Health check card? General BOM Health is an AI-powered check card in OpenBOM BOM Review. Instead of validating fixed rules, it reasons over the content of your BOM and surfaces observations an experienced engineer would catch, such as near-duplicate parts, long-lead-time components, and missing data-hygiene columns.

How is AI BOM Health different from the other BOM Review checks? The Part Number, Property, and Structure cards are deterministic: they return the same answer every time and identify exactly which rule was violated. AI BOM Health analyzes BOM content and surfaces judgment-level observations. Its findings are always informational, never Errors or Warnings.

Does AI BOM Health work on multi-level BOMs? Yes. For multi-level structures, the AI evaluates each BOM in the tree and streams results back progressively, so insights appear as soon as each part of the structure is analyzed. Findings in lower-level BOMs are navigable directly from the check card.

Is AI BOM Health included in my OpenBOM subscription? AI BOM Health is available as part of an AI subscription add-on. Teams without the add-on see the card with a short explanation and a link to get in touch about enabling it. The deterministic BOM Review check cards remain available without the add-on.

Can AI findings become tasks? Yes. Any AI finding can be turned into a comment or a task with an owner, the same way as any other BOM Review finding, keeping the follow-up work and the reasoning inside the collaborative workspace.

Conclusion

General BOM Health brings experienced-engineer judgment to every BOM review cycle, surfacing consolidation opportunities, lead-time risks, and data-hygiene gaps that no fixed rule can catch, while keeping humans in charge of every decision. Your deterministic checks verify the rules. The AI card reads between the lines. Together they catch problems before they cost you a build.

REGISTER FOR FREE and check how OpenBOM can help

Best, Oleg