When deliveries slip, the investigation usually lands on scheduling, supplier performance, or capacity. BOM accuracy is rarely mentioned, partly because it’s invisible from the delivery end and partly because it doesn’t feel like a delivery issue. It’s frequently the origin of one.

The Chain From Data Error to Late Shipment

Follow it through. A BOM understates a component quantity by ten percent. MRP calculates requirements from the BOM, so purchase orders are ten percent short. Material arrives, production starts, and consumption runs ahead of plan. The shortage appears partway through the run — not at the start, where it would be obvious, but midway, where it’s most disruptive.

Production stops or switches to another job. The component is expedited, arriving days later at premium cost. The original job restarts, now behind, and everything scheduled after it has shifted. One data error has produced a late delivery, an expedite cost, and a cascade of secondary delays.

From the customer’s view, you were late. From the schedule review, the cause was a material shortage. Almost nobody traces it back to the BOM.

Other Routes to The Same Outcome

Missing components. A part omitted from the BOM is never ordered, and the discovery happens at assembly.

Wrong lead times. A component with a fourteen-day lead time in the system and a genuine twenty-eight-day lead time will be ordered too late, every single time, on every order.

Obsolete parts still listed. Requisitions generate for components no longer available, and the substitution conversation starts only when procurement tries to place the order.

Wrong operation assignment. Material is delivered to the wrong point in the process, so it’s physically present but not where it’s needed at the moment it’s needed.

Why the Connection Stays Hidden

Distance in time. The BOM error was made months before the late delivery. Nobody connects the two events.

Distance in department. Engineering or data maintenance made the error. Production and logistics absorbed the consequence. The feedback loop crosses organisational boundaries and usually breaks there.

Compensating behaviour. Experienced planners quietly add buffers to BOMs they don’t trust. This masks the error, which means it’s never corrected, and it inflates inventory permanently.

Closing the Loop

Add BOM accuracy to your delay reason codes. When a job is late due to material, record whether the shortage was a supplier issue, a planning issue, or a data issue. Within a quarter you’ll have a distribution, and most manufacturers doing this for the first time find the data-issue share larger than they assumed.

Then work the top items by frequency. Correcting a handful of BOMs often improves delivery performance more than any scheduling change.

It’s also worth auditing where planners have added informal buffers. Those buffers are a map of which BOMs your own team doesn’t trust, drawn by the people best placed to know. Ask them directly — most will have a list, and it will be more accurate than any statistical check.

ticktick.ai captures shortage causes against BOM lines, so recurring data errors surface as a pattern rather than as a series of unrelated delays.