John Pritchard is a co-founder and Lead Hardware Engineer at HabitAware, Inc., and an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches an introductory course about the Internet of Things (IoT). “A bill of materials (or BOM) is at the heart of a design well suited for manufacture,” he says. “It is, at its core, a list of all the items necessary to carry out production of a physical good.”