Professional development/Project management/Purchasing Guide

Spending your Project Budget

  1. Before anything is bought by your team, a PM or TA must approve it.
  2. When reviewing BOMs always check for:
    1. Complete list of parts, this should be representative of the designs and include fasteners and wire and everything else.
    2. Shipping and tax costs, duties can be expensive so try to buy things from Canada.
    3. If a cheaper or better alternative exists.
    4. If a cheaper supplier exists.
  3. When looking for places to find parts, here is the order of places to look:
    1. In the Makerlab, there is an inventory (cost included in BOM).
    2. In the Makerstore (cost included in BOM).
    3. Online or local stores, some common places are below.

Building a bill of materials (BOM)

Your project BOM will include all components necessary to build your final product. Based on that list you will be able to tally your product cost. You may have other items that are necessary to test your different prototypes however. For example you may need a breadboard to test a prototype but that will not be included in the final product, the breadboard would then be included in your list of equipment but not your bill of materials.

  1. Don't forget to add links to each item
  2. Don't forget the taxes
  3. Don't forget the shipping
  4. Don't forget to include costs of 3D printing or laser cutting materials, estimates can be found from https://makerepo.com/print_orders/index_new

Online and Local Stores

General

Mechanical/hardware

Electrical/robotics