Assembling Product Documentation Automatically Using a Bill of Materials

A bill of materials (BOM) is a list of parts required to assemble a specific (typically, physical) product. BOM tells engineers at manufacturing companies which parts and components should be used in a particular assembly.

Unlike engineers, technical writers usually don’t have tools that would let them match parts defined in the BOM with the content to be included into the product documentation. Often times, technical writers have to manually select and put together pieces of content for each product. This process is both time consuming and error prone.

Wouldn’t it be great if a documentation for a particular product could be assembled automatically based on the information provided in the BOM?

A solution that we've built consists of three components:

• Structured product configuration, which is represented by a BOM. It doesn't necessarily have to be in an XML format. Even Excel is good enough.
• Structured content enriched with semantic markup and metadata, which defines whether a particular piece of content matches the product components defined in the BOM.
• Structured templates, which define the structure of a document of a specific type. For example, if you produce user manuals for end users and service manuals for maintenance engineers, all user manuals will likely share the same structure, and all service manuals will share a different structure. Essentially, a structured template defines the location of a piece of content within the document.

I’ve recorded a short video (7 minutes) to show how this solution is implemented: