Without a proper bill of material, you will never reach your full efficiency potential. There is much more to a bill of material than the set of kit components offered by most general accounting systems.

Your bill of material specifications drive the entire system, including material requirements, job scheduling, costing, and shop floor control.

We offer you a full-featured bill of material that can handle virtually any type of product, including discrete, batch, make to order, and make to stock.

First you define your work centers, which are the physical production areas or machines that comprise your shop. Within each work center, you can optionally create a library of standard processes or operations that are used as templates for creating product routings.

In this screen, you can set up your subcontractor suppliers that perform outside services such as painting, plating, and heat-treating. You can optionally set up a library of standard processes that are used as templates for creating outside service routing sequences.

Manufacturing specifications for your products are entered in the Bills of Material screen. Five bill of material types are offered: BOM, Batch, Phantom, One-Off, and Secondary.

Let's take the standard bill of material type first, which is used for discrete manufacturing where specifications are defined for one unit of the parent product and jobs are run in multiple quantities.

Here on the Revisions tab, you can optionally track engineering changes by revision. Each product has a current revision, which is used for active production, a pending revision for the next version of the product, and archived revisions.

Here on the routing tab, you define the processes or operations that are performed to make the product. You can use the Routing Generator to rapidly generate a routing from work center and subcontractor standard processes.

Within each routing sequence, you specify the work center, machine, setup time, and cycle time for each process. You also can enter unlimited job traveler notes as well as step-by-step tasks.

If during the course of the job you sent parts our for subcontract services such as painting, plating, and heat-treating, the outside process is defined with a routing sequence. Here you see the subcontract supplier, the price, and a conversion multiplier if the service is priced in a different unit of measure than the item's unit of measure.

Here we are looking at the Components tab where you specify the raw materials, purchase parts, and subassemblies that comprise the product. Each component is optionally assigned to the routing sequence where it is consumed. The overage percentage provides a safety factor to cover expected scrap. The Speed Entry function enables you to rapidly generate a set of components.

Let's now discuss the Batch bill of material type, which is used for batch process manufacturing where specifications are entered against a fixed batch size.

Here on the Revisions tab, you define a batch size against each revision.

Here on the Components tab, the usage quantity for each component is the amount that goes into the batch size, which you see here.

The Phantom bill of material type is highly useful for make to order and custom manufacturing. A phantom assembly is a make to order subassembly that is never made on its own.

The phantom parent is added as a component within other products. At time of job creation, the phantom parent is swapped out by the complete set of phantom assembly components.

Phantom assemblies can be copied into jobs as needed to handle customized product options.

The fourth BOM type is the One-Off type. One-off items are generated automatically during quote and sales order entry and represent items that are made on a one-time basis only. When the sales order is closed, the one-off item is automatically inactivated. One-off item specifications are the same as those for the standard bill of material type, except for revision control, which is not applicable.

The final BOM type is for Secondary outputs.

Secondary outputs are added to other bills of material here on the Outputs tab. Each job has a primary output, which is the BOM parent, but can also have other outputs. These can be by-products, co-products, usable scrap, or used parts that are derived from disassembly jobs. Each output can be given a Cost Ratio percentage, which is its share of the unit cost.

Several inquiries help you view your bill of material specifications, including the Indented View, Tree View, BOM Explorer screen, and the Where Used inquiry.

When jobs are generated by MRP, your job details initially start our identical to your bill of material specifications. Once the job exists, however, you may freely modify the job routing or component specifications for any custom requirements without affecting the item's standard bill of material.

All the job details ultimately print out on the job traveler, which provides your shop people with the specifications they need to make the product.

A variety of tools are provided to help you maintain your bills of material.

Bills of material can be originated from a copy of another bill of material.

New revisions can be originated from current revisions.

The Component Replace screen enables you to mass replace a component across all bills of material where it is used.

The Process replace screen enables you to replace a process across all routing sequences where it is used.

With our bill of material, you will get a handle on your costs like never before.

Based on reported job hours and actual costs, the Shop Rates screen calculates on overall shop rate for direct labor and an overall shop rate for manufacturing overhead.

These rates are applied to your work centers and can be adjusted where needed by Cost Factors to give particular work centers a lower or higher share of the two shop rates.

The Cost Rollup breaks out your manufactured item costs into seven cost elements: material, labor, setup, subcontract services, manufacturing overhead, shipping, and miscellaneous. These costs are rolled up through all levels of the product structure.

The bill of material is the foundation of any good manufacturing system and is an absolute requirement for reaching your efficiency potential. With DBA, you get a full-featured bill of material that provides the essential inputs to the core processes (material requirements, job scheduling, shop floor control, costing) that are the drivers of your efficiency.