Where-Used / Reverse BOM Lookup

The problem this kills

A supplier sends an end-of-life notice on a tiny component. A material price spikes. Engineering redesigns a bracket. The question is always the same, and it is always urgent: which of our products actually use this part?

Your BOM (bill of materials - the recipe of parts that make up each product) is a flat list of "parent uses child" lines. To answer the question by hand, someone opens a spreadsheet, filters for the part, finds the sub-assemblies that contain it, then filters again for the assemblies that contain those, and again, and again - because a single screw can sit five levels deep inside a dozen finished goods. It is slow, it misses parents, and it gets quietly wrong the moment the BOM changes.

So buyers over-order the wrong thing, planners warn the wrong product owners, and an obsolete part surfaces on a production line three weeks later.

What you'll build

A private web tool for your team. You type (or pick) a part number, and it walks the BOM upward through every level - child to parent to grandparent all the way to finished goods - and shows you:

• every assembly and sub-assembly that contains the part,
• every top-level product ultimately affected,
• the quantity rolled up through each path, and
• the full chain so you can see exactly how the part gets there: part -> sub-assembly -> product.

Then it builds an impact report you review. Nothing is sent or exported until you approve it. With one click you export a clean CSV, or email the affected product owners through Resend.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before writing a line of code, the plan has the AI agent ask about your real BOM - how your part numbers and SKUs are named, whether you have phantom or reference-only lines, how deep your assemblies nest, your typical and peak part counts, and your messiest edge cases. It reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. The tool is tailored to your data, not a generic template.
• A step-by-step build, each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt for your AI coding agent.
• A safe multi-level "walk upward" that traverses every BOM level and guards against cycles (a part that loops back on itself), so the tool never spins forever.
• The full-path display, rolled-up quantities, and a dedupe guard so the same part-and-parent line can't double-count.
• A human approval gate, a CSV export in the exact columns your system expects, and optional owner emails.
• A complete No-API fallback: BOM CSV in, impact CSV out - fully usable today even with zero integration to your ERP.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own BOM data.
• A full audit trail - who searched what, who approved which impact report, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate: the AI builds the impact list, a person reviews and approves it, and only then does anything get exported or emailed.
• Duplicate guards so the same impact report can't be sent twice and the same part-parent line can't be counted twice.

Who it's for

Engineers, buyers, and planners who have to react fast to part changes, end-of-life notices, redesigns, and supplier problems - and need to know, with confidence, every product a change touches and exactly who to warn.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.