Cloning a bill of materials (BOM) is the way we approach making variations of your product at NowFactory. Whether it's T-shirts with different designs, or toys that come in different colors, our option to clone a BOM can save you money on engineering and allow you to start producing as soon as possible.

What Does It Mean To "Clone" A Bill of Materials?

Cloning is our way of describing how we handle variations for your products. When you clone a BOM, you are telling us you would like everything about the engineering to be kept the same, you would just like to have aesthetic changes and treat them as separate products. As long as the changes you want to make don't change the overall weight or size of the package, we will happily clone your BOM and list your  variation on your profile. 

After we approve your request to clone, we get to work engineering a new variant bill of materials. Since most of the engineering we did previously will be the same, there is less required from the engineers. Because of this, the price and time to complete will be drastically reduced.

Why Would You Want To Clone Your Bill of Materials?

If you are looking to add more quantity of an item, or bundle more items together you will not be able to clone your BOM. If you are just looking to have multiple designs or colors for your product however, cloning is right up your alley. 

For example, say you are selling dog toys and have already completed engineering for a line of your toy that comes in a green color. If you would like to release a version of your toy in red, instead of paying the full engineering price and going through the process again you can simply clone your existing BOM and only change the color.

After doing this you will easily be able to choose which color you would like us to produce. If you are running low on the red version of the toy, but fully stocked on the green version, you can choose to restock just the red variant. Keep in mind you still have to provide the correct raw materials for your clones/variations.

How To Clone Your Bill Of Materials

If you decide to clone your BOM, it's simple enough that you can do it all from our website while logged into your account. In the My Bill of Materials section, you will see an option below your listed BOMs to clone your bill of materials. From here, as the pictures below show, there are two fields for you to fill out. These will give us the information we need to determine whether an order is eligible for cloning.

The first field is asking for the original BOM number you are trying to clone. If you are trying to create a clone of your green dog toys so you can start making red dog toys, in the first field you would put the BOM number of the green dog toys.

The second field is for describing what changes from the original bill of materials you would like to make. Here it is important to be as detailed as possible so we can fully understand your needs. Bringing back the dog toy example, if you are wanting to create red toys, an example description could be "The color will need to be changed from green material to red material. There are no other changes, final product stays the same." From there if we have any more questions we will contact you. Once everything is understood we will begin creating your new BOM and product codes. We will also begin preparing to receive your new materials. Keep in mind that with variations we will need new raw materials to reflect the changes you want to make.

It Gets Better As You Grow

At NowFactory we love to see your business growing. Which is why as your business is growing with us we offer free BOM cloning and variations to our Corporate Plan subscribers and above. In addition to other perks, both the Corporate and Enterprise Plan assumes you have many products with a lot of volume and maybe even seasonal production runs. Because of this we want to make creating and listing your product variations as easy as possible. There's no better time than Now to get started with NowFactory!