A document known as a bill of materials organizes information about the elements and materials provided for the implementation of the project. Its role is to collect in one place the data resulting from the project documentation and translate them into a readable list that can be related to the actual needs of the investment.
In practice, the list includes, among other things, types of materials, their approximate quantities, units of measurement and purpose in specific parts of the object. It is not a shopping list, but a tool that organizes the project from a technical and organizational point of view. Thanks to this, the investor, the designer and the contractors operate on the same assumptions and understand the scope of the designed solutions in the same way. The importance of the material statement is revealed especially at the stage of preparation of the implementation. It allows you to better assess the scale of the project, compare design solutions and identify key elements from the point of view of construction, installation or finishing. It also facilitates the detection of possible inconsistencies between individual industries even before the start of work.
It is worth emphasizing that the scope and degree of detail of the statement depends on the stage of the project. It looks different in the concept documentation and different in the executive design, where precision is much more important. The more advanced the project, the greater the role of the schedule as an organizing and control tool. The table of materials performs an indicative and informative function. It helps to understand what the building will actually consist of and what solutions were envisaged by the designer. For the project team, it is a connecting element of documentation, which facilitates consistency between project assumptions and their subsequent implementation.
