Describe bills of materials (BOMs), routes, and operations
Although each company’s manufacturing processes are unique, depending on the nature of the production environment, the core conceptual elements that are used in the Production control module are often similar.
Creating a production order is a request to start manufacturing the quantity of items specified on the order. All information associated with the item that is to be produced is contained in the production order. Production orders have either a list of raw materials from the BOM or a formula that might contain coproducts and by-products, the required resources, the routes, and the operations.
Whether the company produces items that are made to order, made to stock, or engineered to order, the manufacturing facility can use the features in the Production control module to change production orders so that they're streamlined to their specific production requirements.
The core concepts in the Production control module are described in the following sections.
Calendar
You can create a working time calendar to define the availability of the resource capacity based on date and time. You can create an overall calendar for your production and several calendars for resources that operate at different times or shifts. You can also create a separate calendar for different resource groups.
To create a calendar, you can navigate to Organization administration > Setup > Calendars > Calendars.
Resources
Resources are the company’s total working resources. They can be anything that is used to create, produce, or deliver a good and/or service over and beyond the materials consumed in the process. Resources can be of different types, including machines, tools, people, vendors, or locations.
Resource types
You create resource types in the Organization administration module. They're used in production, along with the calendar, to manage the overall capacity of a company's equipment and resources. Each resource can be associated with a resource type, and one or multiple resources can exist in any given resource type.
The following resource types are available in Supply Chain Management:
Vendor - Use this type for operations or tasks performed by an outside resource or subcontractor. A vendor number can be associated with this kind of resource to help with scheduling and tracking.
Human resources - Use this type to define when personnel or a group of employees conduct an operation.
Machine - Use this type to tie an individual machine or group of machines with a resource. It's the most frequently used type of resource.
Tool - Use this type to control and schedule the reservations of a tool. Use this type only when capacity is limited.
Location - Use this type to control and schedule the reservations of a specific location.
Facility - A building or fixed structure that is required to perform an activity.
The following screenshot shows resource types in a dropdown list.
Resource capabilities
You assign resource capabilities to an operation’s resource. A resource can have more than one capability assigned to it, and a capability can be assigned to more than one resource.
You can also assign capabilities to resources on a temporary basis by defining a start date and expiration date on the capability assignment. If a resource loses a capability due to expiration, it can't be scheduled for production tasks requiring that specific feature until the capability is renewed.
When defining resource requirements for a production route, you can specify one or more capabilities as requirements. When scheduling production, the capabilities required for each route operation are matched with the capabilities of the defined resources.
The resources with capabilities that satisfy the requirements are then selected. When defining capabilities for different resources, you should set up capabilities so that different processing speeds are set up as different capabilities.
The following screenshot displays the list of resources for the selected capability of Assembly.
Bill of materials
The bill of materials (BOM) is one of the most important elements in a discrete manufacturing company. Before a company can produce a product, it must know what components are included and how many of these components are needed to make the product. The BOM has all the ingredients, components, parts, or raw materials necessary to make one finished product.
Bill of materials is available from Product information management > Bills of materials and formulas > Bills of materials.
Routes and operations
The route determines the process steps that are needed to produce a finished product.
The BOM defines the materials needed, the resource defines where the item is produced, and the route determines the sequence of events to build the finished product.
Operations are the tasks or work processes that are put together with a route to produce a specific product. Each task is associated with a time allotment to complete the individual task.
Companies can also set up optional settings that control the production process if these settings are relevant to their production environments.
The optional settings are:
Production groups - Set up production groups to establish relationships between the production order and ledger accounts. The ledger accounts are used to post or to group orders for reporting.
Production pools - Create production pools to group production orders for processing urgent production orders or for deleting and posting groups of orders.
Properties - Define properties to create special attributes that you can assign to your resources for use in the scheduling process. These attributes are connected to the working time template.
Resource capabilities - Create resource capabilities in case resources need to perform the various operations in the route that can be expressed as the set of resource capabilities. This allows the allocation of resources to be deferred until production is scheduled.
Formula
Together with the corresponding route, the formula defines the whole process in process manufacturing. It consists of the ingredients and quantities that are required to produce a specific quantity of the formula item. A formula consists of one or more formula lines that identify the ingredients or items that make up the formula. A formula item can contain configured coproducts and by-products.
Formulas are available from Product information management > Bills of materials and formulas > Formulas.
Value streams
Value streams are operating units that group one or multiple production flows. Value stream mapping is an approved method for implementing lean manufacturing. Because value stream is an operating unit, this can be used as a financial dimension too.
The future-state value stream can be modeled as a production flow version. All processes of the value stream are modeled as process activities. Movements or transfers can be modeled as transfer activities if the transfer status must be registered, or if integration with inventory picking or consolidated shipments is required.
Production flow models
Production flow models describe how the capacity of lean manufacturing work cells is calculated and maintained. Lean manufacturing uses Kanban replenishment to reduce delivery lead times and excess inventory between work centers caused by batch production. These features disrupt the production of partially independent Kanban cycles. The activity-based production flow is introduced as a backbone of lean manufacturing to validate the production and cost criteria of various Kanban scenarios.
Production units
A production unit is an administrative unit that is a collection of resource groups. But a resource group can be associated to a single production unit only. A production unit reflects the physical layout of production resources and has no effect on transactions their processing. You must associate a production unit with a site. You can also assign a picking warehouse and a storage warehouse to a production unit. You can use a production unit to consolidate and filter production-related data. For example, a shop floor manager can see an overview of the outstanding workload and the available capacity for a particular production unit.
You can navigate to the Production units page from Production control > Setup > Production.
Production groups
You need to create a production group and associate it with production orders. Production groups establish a relationship between production orders and the ledger accounts. Each production group can have a default posting profile. The default posting profile determines how the transactions for the production orders in the group are posted to the ledger.
To access the production groups, navigate to Production control > Setup > Production > Production groups.
Production pools
Production pools can be used to group the production orders under different criteria. The following list provides examples of grouping criteria:
Priority
Posting criteria
Internal notation
Production information
Kanban functionality
In lean manufacturing, Kanban order is the first step to initiate the production process. The Kanban schedule board lets the production planner control and optimize the production plan for Kanban jobs. It makes the flow of Kanban jobs transparent and gives the production planner a tool that optimizes and adjusts the production plan for the lean manufacturing work cell. You can access the Kanban schedule board page from Production control > Kanban.
Kanban rules are tied to production flows as the foundation that defines the activities of a Kanban. Kanban rules can be set up to support various make-to-stock and make-to-order scenarios.