Product Manufacturing Structures

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Locating the Manufacturing Functions

The opentaps manufacturing system pages are located in two major sections and five tabs as follows:

• [Purchasing] Icon > [Planning] Tab > [MRP] buttons
• [Purchasing] Icon > [Manufacturing] Tab > BOM, Tasks, and Routings buttons
• [Purchasing] Icon > [Orders] Tab > various functional buttons

• [Warehouse] Icon > [Manufacturing] Tab > Production Runs and related buttons
• [Warehouse] Icon > [Inventory] Tab > various functional buttons

In the discussions that follow, we will refer to specific functions within these system areas.

Types of Products and Terminology

opentaps uses a number of uniquely defined terms when referring to products, in order to better handle the cataloging, sale, procurement, and manufacture of products having a variety of characteristics. Following are the product types most frequently encountered in manufacturing:

Group One

• physical -- real items, stocked in inventory and sold or used in production
• virtual -- a basic abstract template for a class of products with many features from the common base, not stocked, not for sale... just a template, for example a shirt template
• variant -- a real item, stocked and for sale, based upon a virtual template plus features, for example a medium sized, navy blue, button collar, perma-pressed, cotton shirt
• configurable -- a real item, stocked and for sale, that can be ordered with some additional optional products defined in the configuration options
• subassembly -- a physical item used within a physical product that is for sale
• raw material -- items often purchased that are used in making a product
• work in process -- items and materials moved into a production process that has not yet finished the end product

Group Two

• services -- a product offered for sale which is delivered as some kind of service, thus it is not in inventory but rather is delivered by executing the service itself
• digital -- a product offered for sale which is delivered as digital data, often fulfilled by online delivery (download)
• rental assets -- a product which is a fixed asset that is rented, such as a hotel room or an automobile rental

Group Three

• features -- features are variations offered on a virtual template, when selected the features are part of the physical variant product that is actually sold and delivered
• options -- are real products that can be added to the configuration of a configurable product and delivered along with it in a single order, thus options are held in inventory and delivered along with configurable products

Documentation Items and How They Are Related

Documentation about how the finished product is actually processed (as it is manufactured) is captured in three types of information items used in the opentaps manufacturing:

• The Bill Of Material (BOM) describes the components and materials used in each stage of the fabrication or construction of the finished good. The BOM provides for capturing material costs as they are used up in production.

• The Routing Tasks describe how each step of the manufacturing operations is performed and provides for capturing the cost of labor and time when executing each step.

• The Production Routings are the documents which specify how the step by step (routing tasks) operations are combined in sequences resulting in a finished good. So, routings are the road-map or the orchestration for how the whole production run is conducted.

Refer to each of these three documentation sections for guidance on usage and for screen details.

A careful inspection of the above documentation items will reveal that the following relationships are the key links between them:

Top Level
 The product catalog -- Product ID 

Level Two
 The Routing -- refers to the Product ID (Top Level)
 The BOM -- refers to the Product ID (Top Level)

Level Three 
 The Routing -- points to the BOM via the Product ID explicitly
 The Routing -- refers to all of the Routing Tasks via a specific "association"
 The BOM -- refers to the Routing Task to control issue of materials and components
 The BOM (alternate) -- refers explicitly to an alternate Routing if there is one

Manual Pages > Production Runs

What the Production Management Processes Do < Section Pages > Managing and Executing Production Runs