Introduction to Process

This set of resources provides you with practical information on how to work with our cloud-based application.

Production planning can be thought of as the end-to-end process of using your BOM to buy the parts you need.

  1. Assign vendors to items in catalogs.
  2. Calculate quantities based on the bill of materials for specific product batches.
  3. Manage inventory of parts by controlling the quantity on hand.
  4. Organizing order BOM to provide a summary of what needs to be purchased from which vendors.
  5. Automate preparation of purchase orders to help sourcing parts and contract work.

The Major Components to Production Planning in OpenBOM

  • Vendor list(s) with vendor information defined
  • Catalog with vendor list assigned
  • BOM with catalog assigned
  • Order BOM
  • Production batches
  • Purchase order
  • Release and inventory control

Creating an Order BOM

An order BOM is a BOM which has been scaled by the quantity of a particular batch “order” for that BOM.  For example, if your skateboard BOM has a line item of wheels, each with 2 bearings per wheel and you receive an order for 5 skateboards, then you will have:

4 (wheels) X 2 (bearings per wheel) X 5 Orders = 40 bearings in your order BOM.

The same will be true for all the other items in your BOM.  They will be scaled to the requirements of the particular order quantity, in this example, 5.

Order BOMs are activated by clicking the orders button in the BOM menu bar. The image below is an example of a BOM which is ready to create an order BOM for:

When the Orders panel appears, click on “Create” to create a new order.  This creates an order BOM which defines how many of each BOM you will be building with this order. In this example, we will build 5 of the “SB7000-PO” skateboards.

Add the number of units in the order and click “Save”.

To open your order BOM, click on the link:

 

NOTE: In the past only one order could be active at a time, but now OpenBOM supports any number of open orders per BOM.

Assigning Vendors

This next step is not necessary if you have already defined your vendors in the associated catalog. In other words, if you have defined preferred and secondary vendors in the catalog (the preferred method) you will not need to specify a vendor list here. Skip to Create Purchase Order below.

If you are not using a catalog, or have not defined vendors in the catalog, complete this step.

Next assign a vendor list to choose vendors from. In this case we will assign VL-3 as our vendor list. See help on vendor lists for more information.

For reference, we are including an image of our vendor list here.  You won’t need to open the vendor list as part of this process but this is a good time to introduce the concept.

Now that you have assigned your vendor list (VL-3) to your order BOM, it is time to specify a vendor for each item in your order BOM.  Vendors may be assigned in the order BOM only if you have not pre-defined them in the associated item catalog(s).

For each item in your order BOM, assign a vendor from the drop-down list. Remember, the vendors shown will be coming from vendor list(s) you selected above.

Assign a vendor to each of the items in the order BOM.

Ensure that all items have a vendor (defined in the catalog or in the order BOM).

Creating Purchase Orders

Click “Create/Update Purchase Order” to generate a purchase order for each of the vendors assigned in the order BOM. Purchase orders will be created in the purchase order area of the dashboard.

In our example, we have assigned three different vendors so OpenBOM will create three purchase orders, one for each vendor.

A message will pop up letting you know that the purchase order(s) have been created. Go to Dashboard > Production Planning tab > Purchase Orders to view them.

The Purchase Orders dashboard has new features and now includes a “Status” column to let you know if your PO’s are open or if they have been received.

Now that we have three purchase orders, let’s open the one for McMaster.

The final step is to produce and export the purchase order we will send to the supplier:

Click “Export” as shown above.

Finally, here is the purchase order.

Your purchase order is ready to send to the supplier.

Updating & Receiving Purchase Orders

Once you’ve exported your purchase order files and sent them out to your suppliers, now it’s time to receive them and see how you mark them as received in your dashboard. OpenBOM has a new feature that makes that easier than ever.

To mark your PO’s as received, all you have to do is open the purchase order you want to update and click on the “Receive PO” button in the top toolbar.

This will increment your quantity on hand of these parts automatically and change the PO’s status to “Received” in the dashboard. That’s all you have to do!

Here’s a short video where you can see the production planning and inventory control feature improvements in action:

Summary

  1. We created an approved vendor list for our company (VL-3)
  2. We created a new BOM (SB7000)
  3. Edited the catalog to set vendors
  4. Assigned the catalog to the BOM (skateboard PartsMaster)
  5. Created an order BOM for the batch quantity
  6. Created/updated the PO
  7. Exported each PO as a PDF to send to our supplier
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