Bill of materials

Bill of materials

Before starting to manufacture or disassemble products, we need to make sure that we have bills of materials (BOM) for these products. The BOM specifies the component products that make up the larger product. Cin7 Core offers several types of BOM, which are optimized for different assembly and manufacturing processes. This article explains the different types of BOM and explains which BOM is best for your requirements.

Prerequisites

  • You should know how to set up products.

  • You will need user permissionInventory → Products and families and Inventory → Product - Bill of materials in order to add and edit the assembly BOM for a product.

  • You will need the Production → Production BOM user permission to add and edit the production BOM for a product, including make-to-order BOM and product family BOM.

  • You will need access to the Advanced Manufacturing module to add production BOMs to your products.

 

Assembly BOM

Assembly BOM is the simplest bill of materials in Cin7 Core. This BOM is best for simple assembly operations such as joining together multiple items in a pack or kit or disassembling a pack into single items.

Assembly BOMs allow assembly and disassembly of the same components, and can have multiple levels (nested BOMs). Assembly BOMs can take overheads and labor costs into account, but do not take into account production resource capacity (machinery, labor, etc.). Assembly and disassembly tasks can only be generated for products with an Assembly BOM.

See Assembly BOM, Assembly, Disassembly, and Multi-level assembly for more information.

Production BOM

A production BOM defines each step of a production operation, its duration, and the components and resources (machinery, labor, etc.) required to complete each step. This BOM requires Advanced Manufacturing module subscription.

Production BOMs are best for products with multi-step manufacturing processes, processes which produce multiple finished goods simultaneously, processes where intermediate or semi-finished products need to be tracked, processes with third party manufacturing, and more. Production BOMs can contain products with their own production BOM.

See Production BOM for more information.

Make-to-order BOM

Customizable products, or make-to-order, allows your customers to select different configuration options that will ultimately select the final product. This BOM is best for custom products that are made in small quantities depending on customer demand. For example, a ring could be customized with different metals, ring size, different gemstones, or a custom engraving. This BOM requires Advanced Manufacturing module subscription.

See Make-to-order BOM for more information.

Product family BOM

Product families are used to group together products with similar characteristics but different options, for example colour and size of clothing. Depending on the number of options, there can be a large number of product family variations. Manufacturing a product family requires each variation to have a production BOM, but adding these one by one is inefficient.

Product family production BOMs creates a general production BOM for the family (e.g. shirt) but allows other product family variations to be used as components (e.g. fabric). Production BOMs for each variation are auto-generated from the general BOM and the mapping values, saving our users lots of time when preparing production BOMs for many variations at once. This BOM requires the Advanced Manufacturing module subscription.

Once a product family BOM has been generated for a family variation, it will operate as a regular production BOM, and can be edited without changing the 'default' BOM for the family. However, changes to the 'default' family BOM can be propagated to the variations.

See Production BOMs for product families for more information.

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