Patent ID: 8046379

Claim:
A system for managing a plurality of bills of material (BOMs) comprising: a client terminal coupled to a network and providing access to one or more users to information on at least one bill of material (BOM) of the plurality of BOMs, each BOM describable as a tree with each node an element, each BOM associated with an owner of a set of owners and each element in each BOM associated with an owner of the set of owners, and a server processing system coupled to the network and storing the plurality of BOMs in a local or distributed database, such that BOMs associated with different owners are stored in the same database, the storing including storing one or more data structures in the database configured to store the plurality of BOMs; and wherein the server processing system provides unrestricted access to confidential information in a particular stored BOM only to the owner associated with the particular BOM and to any designate of the owner; wherein the server processing system provides access to the stored BOMs to one or more users, each user being associated with an entity, the providing access including providing remote access over the network via the client terminal, and wherein a role of a set of roles is assigned to one or more users for a particular element of a particular BOM, each role having an associated set of rules that define access privileges for a role-holding user for the particular element, such that the assigned role for a user for an element automatically defines the access privilege that the role-holding-user has to the element.