Abstract: A method and system for processing a multilevel bill of material contained in a relational database that does not require a pre-established limit on the number of levels that can be processed and minimizes user lock out from the same data. A control table keeps track of each component retrieved at a given level of the bill of material, tagging each table entry with a component item identifier, bill of material level, and component sequence number, which identifies the order in which components are processed at each level. A counter is used to keep track of the next level in the bill of material to be processed and a stack data structure is used to indicate the sequence number of the next component to be processed at a given level. The contents of the counter and top of the stack are used to index into the control table to select for processing the entry in the table that has a bill of material level and sequence number matching the contents of the counter and top of stack, respectively.