BOM Disassembly with the BOM Breakdown Feature
The core of manufacturing is to take a group of raw materials and convert them into a new product, typically with the use of machines, chemical conversion, and good, old-fashioned elbow grease. This list of materials and the labor required is called the BOM (bill of materials). Almost all processes in a manufacturing ERP are driven to producing a single item.
But sometimes, you need that BOM to go in the other direction - to break out into the specific components. You need to be able to disassemble that BOM from one piece of material into multiple, removing the BOM from your inventory and placing the components and raw material back into your inventory.
Without a way to simplify and automate the steps process, it can mean incredibly tedious and error-prone data entry. Cetec ERP has a BOM breakdown feature, known in other systems as BOM disassembly, that makes this process easy.
You can use the BOM breakdown to disassemble the BOM either during receipt on the receiving screen or on the bin for that specific receipt. Cetec ERP will adjust the qty of the BOM out, and allow the user to determine the quantity of each individual component which is being inventory adjusted into stock, with comments pointing back to the source receipt or PO. All of this means you can easily audit and sort inventory activity both during and after the fact.
A few instances where this is useful:
-
You run into quality issues during production. If you are at the final QC (quality control) inspection stage of production, and determine that the product as-is does not pass inspection, you need to be able to log that failure without removing the audit trail and all the labor logged. You’d complete the work order into stock in order to preserve the work order and all history, then use BOM breakdown on the failed quantity to salvage the raw materials that were still usable.
-
A customer returns your product on an RMA. Let’s say that your customer returns a defective product. During the disposition process, you determine that you can re-use some of the raw materials. By using the BOM breakdown against the receiving PO for the RMA, you can replace the salvaged materials into your inventory.
-
Your vendor only supplies a kit, rather than pieces. Some vendors or suppliers are only able to supply a full kit of components, rather than individual parts. In order to help streamline the PO and A/P process, you can use their kit’s part number as the BOM and utilize the BOM breakdown to place those individual parts into stock. If certain components are short in a kit, this process leaves an audit trail to address those discrepancies.
-
A single piece gets cut or produced into multiple pieces. For example, bar stock steel might be cut into four different pieces of different lengths. You might choose to use dimension inventory, but if you wanted those different lengths to be modeled as individual part numbers, you could use BOM breakdown to address this issue.
While the above scenarios can be tough to run into without the right tools, Cetec ERP’s BOM breakdown tool is here to keep things moving smoothly. To learn how to use BOM breakdown, check out the how to video here.