Use of Bills of Materials

300 section that the manufacturing procedure the routing is attached to the Bill of Materials, so the choice of bill of materials implicitly includes the operations to make it. Once several bills of materials have been defined for a particular product you need to have a system to enable Open ERP to select one of them for use. By default the bill of materials with the lowest sequence number is selected by the system. To gain more control over the process during the sale or procurement, you can use properties. The menu Manufacturing → Configuration → Master Bill of Materials → Properties enables you to define properties, which can be defined arbitrarily to help you select a bill of materials when you have a choice of BoMs. Note: Properties Properties is a concept that enables the selection of a method for manufacturing a product. Properties define a common language between salespeople and technical people, letting the salespeople to have an influence on the manufacture of the products using non-technical language and the choices decided on by the technicians who define Bills of Materials. For example you can define the properties and the following groups: Table 21.20: Properties Property Group Property Warranty 3 years Warranty 1 year Method of Manufacture Serial Method of Manufacture Batch Once the bills of materials have been defined you could associate the corresponding properties to them. Then when the salesperson goes to encode a product line he can attach the properties there. If the product must be manufactured, Open ERP will automatically choose the bill of materials that matches the defined properties in the order most closely. Note the properties are only visible in the Bills of Materials and Sales Management if you are working in the Extended View mode. If you can not see it on your screen add the group Useability Extended View to your user. Figure 21.5: Properties on a customer order line Example: Manufacturing in a batch or on a production line As an example, take the manufacture of the cabinet presented above. You can imagine that the company has two methods of manufacturing this cabinet: 301 • Manually: staff assemble the cabinets one by one and cut the wood plank by plank. This approach is usually used to assembly prototypes. It gets you very rapid production, but at a high cost and only in small quantities. • On a production line: staff use machines that are capable of cutting wood by bandsaw. This method is used for production runs of at least 50 items because the lead times using this method are quite lengthy. The delay to the start of production is much longer, yet the cost per unit is much lower in this volume. You define two bills of materials for the same cabinet. To distinguish between them, you will define to properties in the same group: manual assembly and production line assembly . On the quotation, the salesperson can set the method of manufacture he wants on each order line, depending on the quantities and the lead time requested by the customer. Note: bills of materials and substitute products In some software, you use the term substitute for this principle of configurable properties in a bill of materi- als. By putting a bill of materials on its own line, you can also implement substitute products. You set the bill of materials to type Assembly to make the substitution transparent and to prevent Open ERP from proposing an intermediate production order.

21.4 Manufacturing

Once the bills of materials have been defined, Open ERP becomes capable of automatically deciding on the manufacturing route depending on the needs of the company. Production orders can be proposed automatically by the system depending on several criteria described in the preceding chapter: • Using the Make to Order rules, • Using the Order Point rules, • Using the Production plan. Clearly it is also possible to start production manually. To do this you can use the menu Manufacturing → Manufacturing → Manufacturing Orders. Figure 21.6: Menufacturing Order If you have not installed the Just-In-Time planning module mrp_jit, you should start using Open ERP to schedule the Production Orders automatically using the various system rules. To do this use the menu Warehouse 302 → Schedulers → Compute Schedulers.

21.5 Workflow for complete production

To understand the usefulness and the functioning of the system you should test a complete workflow on the new database installed with the demonstration data. In the order you can see: • The creation of a customer order, • The manufacturing workflow for an intermediate product, • The manufacture of an ordered product, • The delivery of products to a customer, • Invoicing at the end of the month, • Traceability for after-sales service. Tip: Demonstration data To follow the workflow shown below exactly, you should keep the same quantities as in the example and start from a new database. Then you will not run into exceptions that would result from a lack of stock. This more advanced case of handling problems in procurement, will be sorted out later in the chapter.

21.5.1 The customer order

Begin by encoding a customer order. To do this, use the menu Sales → Sales → Sales Order. Enter the following information: • Customer : Agrolait, • Shipping Policy : Invoice from Deliverysecond tab, • Order Line : – Product : PC2 – Basic PC assemble on demand, – Quantity UoM : 1, – Product UoM : PCE, – Procure method : Make To Order. Once the quotation has been entered you can confirm it immediately by clicking the button Confirm Order at the bottom to the right, the manufacturing order automatically generated. 303 Figure 21.7: Automatically generated manufacturing orders from sale order Keep note of the order reference because this follows all through the process. Usually, in a new database, this will be SO007 . At this stage you can look at the process linked to your order using the Process button above and to the right of the form. Figure 21.8: Process for handling Sales Order SO007 Start the requirements calculation using the menu Warehouse → Schedulers → Compute Schedulers.

21.5.2 Producing an Intermediate Product

To understand the implications of requirements calculation, you must know the configuration of the sold product. To do this, go to the form for product PC2 and click on the link Bill of Materials to the right. You get the scheme shown in Structure of BoM for product PC2 which is the composition of the selected product.