Bill of Materials software management with Mago.net

The Bill of Materials is the description of a product expressed in terms of list of components and list of operations to execute in order to construct the finished product.

Bill of Materials management

It is interesting to stress that the quantities of the components can also be expressed in percentage.
In turn, the components can be separated so as to give rise to a multilevel description of the same. This mechanism can be used to potentially create bills of materials with an infinite number of levels. When saving, a non-recursive control is triggered to ensure the correctness of the bill of materials just inserted.

To define the work cycle structure it is necessary to set the information needed to carry out the work, which are as follows:

• Operations
• Work centres
• Teams

The characteristic information of each cycle is the operation to carry out. The operation may be formed of machining work (e.g. cutting, milling) or by another activity (e.g. test and inspection, assembly).
The work centres, the teams that deal with fitting out, the teams that handle the working process, the times and the costs are associated with the operations.

It is possible moreover join a given operation to a Work Center Family. This association allows, during CRP planning, to manage a distribution of workloads across multiple centers characterized by possibly different working calendars (Multicalendar functionality).

The term working cycle means the list of operations that need to be executed in order to obtain the end product.

Bill of Materials Routing

This operation contains all the data relative to the production modality: resources engaged, times costs.
The work centre is the machine that physically performs the operation. It can be:

• in-house, so belonging to and directly managed by the company
• outsourced to an external supplier.

The times that may be indicated for the operation are broken down into:

• setting up
• working process
• queue

The Bogus Bill does not correspond to a product, but is a simple set of items that allows the user to insert the same series of components in separate bills of materials; in the various production phases the procedures explode the bogus bill and replace it with all the components that make it up.
 

Explosion is used to where the development of a bill of materials starts from the top level object and is broken down to the lowest level object.
By using this method it is possible to hierarchically (tree structure of the dependencies) visually all the components that make up the actual bill of materials. At the same time as the list of materials, it is possible to request visualisation of the operations that occur at the various levels.

The Implosion procedure is used to respond to the question “which bills of materials a given item is used in and in what quantities”.
For this purpose, inversely to how the explosion works, it is possible to visualise the list of bills of materials where the searched component is used, thus obtaining information relative to the quantity of use and to the level of bill of materials it actually appears.
For both procedures, visualisation can be in summarised or detailed form.

Graphic navigation provides an interactive tool to consult the results of an explosion.

Bill of Materials graphical navigation

In this case the decision to use a graphic object makes access to the detailed information desired (item master data, bill of materials master data etc…) simple and intuitive with just a click of the mouse.

The determination of the cost of a product must consider the definition of the bill of materials.

Bill of Materials costing

For this purpose costing functions of the bill of materials are available so it is possible to evaluate the cost of the products according to the materials that make them up, the working process and the ancillary costs connected to them, so when the processing is finished it is possible to update the costs in the items master datasheet.

The programme manages an archive of mechanical design drawings guaranteeing their traceability and retaining the revisions history.

Bill of Materials Drawings

When issued, a drawing must in all cases have a revision number indicated, zero for example. For each revision the data useful for physical search of the drawing are memorised as well as the dates and people in charge of the execution, verification and approval phases.
The drawing code can be used anywhere in the programme (in the production part as well as in the administrative functions) as an alias for an item code, in other words, indicating the drawing code the item code is in any case read and allocated. In this case, the drawing also comes with written descriptions.
 

The technical notes are an extra detail in the item master datasheet.
In particular, based on the Product Category, it is possible to define Technical Notes that require specific information to be input that can be visualised during the report phase.
 

The Production Plan is the document to be used to simply plan the production activity; it contains the list of items to be produced in a given period of time. It can also be treated as a reintegration proposal since the quantities it contains are considered to be produced.
These quantities can derive from:

• the need to fulfil customer orders;
• the need to cover any out-of-stock inventories;
• arbitrary decisions made by the production manager who manually fills in the plan.

Procedures are in place to check the feasibility of the single production plans, providing the quantity of components needed to order.

Bill of Materials - Production Run

With Production Launch procedure one can begin production starting from a Plan or from one or more Bills of Materials.
The Production Return is the second phase in production and at the end of this the load is allocated to inventory of finished products and the components used are discharged.
It is also possible to manage the production return for part quantities, charging the finished product to inventory as the quantities are ready without necessarily having to wait for the conclusion of the whole production cycle.

It is possible to discharge components in a Bill of Materials directly from the sales documents, by appropriately activating some parameters.
By inserting a Bill of Materials item in the sales document, all the components of the Bill of Materials are automatically allocated to the Components Datasheet.
If these are Customer orders, as well as the Bill of Materials item being reserved, the reserve of the components is also increased.
If they are Transport documents or Invoices, the discharge of raw materials and charge of finished product are automatically generated also: the operation corresponds to executing a production launch and return.
 

It is possible to define a number of different calendars in the appropriate master data specifying differently for each of them:

• code and description
• nonworking months, days or hours
• the composition of the various shifts

Even though in general to each work centers is linked the same calendar (called default or factory calendar), it is possible to change this association and to use a series of others of them,  each characterized by different working days and working loads.

It will be possible so, during CRP analysis, to plan differently delivery dates for the desired group of Manufacturing Orders, choose different associations with different calendars.
 

With the environment of a company becoming more and more dynamic, the pressure on engineering processes to accommodate changes is ever increasing.

To increase efficiencies of engineering process, it can be theorized for every of those changes  an "arrangement" , whereby they cannot become effective until a responsible agent releases an Engineering Change Order (ECO).
Being an essential component of Engineering Change Management, an ECO is a written document authorizing application of changes in the scope of the engineering process.

After have enabled the ECO management, the application allows, first of all:

• To Create and use appropriate ECO documents.
• To Manage this document in relationship with the joined Bill Of Material.
• To Manage the various confirmations and proposed changes automatically changing the target Bill of Material.

But also:

• To Use the appropriate reporting using as input a desired "as of the date" in order to display and consider only the desired applied changes.
• Navigate, explode and costify through the proper procedures the desired Bill of Materials considering only changes applied since to a given desired date.