Is Production BOM Right for Your Business?
Have you discovered all the build of materials available in DEAR? If you take a look through our YouTube channel, you’ll see that we have a lot of videos that cover both the Production Bill of Materials (BOM) and Assembly BOM. But how do you know which BOM is best for your business?
To choose the best BOM for you, you need to understand the difference functions and features available in the DEAR inventory system. Once you’ve got the knowledge, you can determine which are the best fit for your unique business. In this blog we’re going to look at the pros and cons of the Production Bill of Materials.
Pros of Using Production BOM
One of the biggest benefits of Production BOM is that it allows you to access the scheduling and capacity planning features. This feature enables you to schedule your production orders, view them in a Gantt chart and make use of capacity planning; set up your resources such as staff or machines and have a view of how much time they have available within a selected time period.
Production BOM also manages subcontracting, which is referred to as co-manufacturing within your DEAR system. If you have any processes where you need to send materials to a third party, or if you sell materials to a third party and you purchase a final item; this feature manages this for you. It will break up its Bill of Materials into what we call steps, or operations so if you have a multi-stage production, this will be the best type of BOM for your business.
An example of a business that would benefit from this type of BOM is an ice cream manufacturer; step one is blending the ingredients, step two is packing the ingredients, step three is your quality control.
The MES (Manufacturing Execution System) app is an additional benefit, which comes as part of the Production Bill of Materials. This is an android app which allows you to track tasks, operations of productions and scans materials to use as part of the job. The app includes production accounting which generates journals for works in progress and collates expenses of labour for you – if your system is connected to a Xero integration or QuickBooks, this can streamline your process.
Within DEAR there is an option called word centres which are within a main location. The Production BOM allows you to have multiple of these so you can fully track where components are moving throughout the operation.
Cons of Using Production BOM
Looking at some of the cons of Production BOM, one of the biggest is the increased user input. There are a lot of functions which is a pro but the more functions there are, the more you have to process. Production BOM requires more interaction from the user to process a job. Within the inventory management system we have to report on what materials have been used, how long it took and if we have enough capacity. If you’re using things like co-manufacturing, you will need to complete this for all stages of the operation.
Production BOM has an increased set up time and, as we often to say to our clients, the system or application you choose is only as good as the data you put in it. To set up a Production BOM requires the raw data to input into the system which can take quite some time to collate. Once collated, it all needs to be added into the system and checked for accuracy.
With new processes and software’s introduced into your business, there is the need to invest in time for training. Learning this module is no small task – it’s a large module – and, as a result, forward planning for your staff to have training needs to be considered. The extensive features also means you’ll have some changes in your internal processes, this is normal with any new area of a system but as the Production BOM has so many different features, you may have to consider some internal process chances alongside your system processes.
To learn more about the wide range of features of DEAR systems, and how to determine which BOM is best for your business, check out our YouTube video.
Want to learn how to import your Production Bill of Materials? Read our blog for a step by step guide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Af4PQWuCA