Assemble-to-order production industries today must be customer- oriented, and offer a large variety of product options to compete in the global market place. A Generic Bill of Material (GBOM) is designed to describe the component structures for a family of products in one data model. The specific Bill of Material for any particular product variant can then be generated on demand. Several different approaches to the GBOM model demonstrated to be reasonably effective, but the construction and verification of GBOM remain difficult. This paper formulates a set of principle requirements for the GBOM model to support visualization and manipulation, aimed at the ease of composition and editing of GBOM models. Based on the framework, the different approaches to the GBOM model were reviewed. A new GBOM model is presently, and the GBOM system briefly introduced. The visual environment for the construction of GBOM model is discussed.