Product engineering

Item master

One record per part, whether you buy it, make it or sell it. The item carries the facts every other module reads instead of re-keying:

Items are versioned. A change to a planning parameter is logged with who changed it and when, because a wrong lead time shows up weeks later as a shortage nobody can explain.

Bills of material

A bill of material lists what goes into an item, per unit, with scrap allowance and effectivity dates. Bills are multi-level: a finished good references sub-assemblies, which reference their own components, and the planning engine explodes the whole tree.

• Revisions. Every bill has a revision. Work orders reference the revision that was current when they were released, so a change made today does not silently alter jobs already on the floor.
• Effectivity. A component line can be effective from a date or a serial, which is how you phase a part change without a hard cutover.
• Phantoms. A phantom sub-assembly is exploded straight through during planning and never stocked, for things like a wire harness built at the line.
• Alternates and substitutes. A line can name an approved substitute with a priority, so the planner has an answer when the primary is short.
• Where used. Any component can be traced upward to every bill that uses it, which is the first question when a supplier discontinues a part.

Routings

A routing is the sequence of operations to make one unit of the item: which work centre, setup time, run time per unit, move and queue time, and whether the operation needs inspection. Routings feed three things at once: capacity planning, shop-floor dispatch and the labour and overhead portion of standard cost.

• Operations can be outsourced. An outside-processing operation raises a purchase requisition for the service and expects the parts back.
• Backflush points mark where component consumption is recorded automatically, for lines where nobody scans each bolt.
• Alternate routings exist for the same item, for a second plant or a slower machine, and the planner picks one at release.

Engineering change

An engineering change order groups the item, bill and routing edits that have to land together, routes them for approval, and applies them on an effective date. Open work orders are flagged when their revision is superseded, and the planner decides whether they finish on the old revision or are re-released. The change history is the audit trail for a customer, an auditor or a warranty claim.

Configuration to confirm

The authored schema includes bill effectivity dates, bill and routing versions, standard costs and supplier-item terms. Phantom items, component substitutes, serial-based effectivity, average costing and operation backflush rules require additional fields and actions. Review those extensions with the plant before representing them as enabled behaviour.