Completing a chain of production orders

This is a weird one but you might be able to use Phantom Materials for this. The idea here is that Item B and C would have their own BOMs, operations and materials. When you add one of these items to a BOM (Item A) and mark it with a Material Type of “Phantom” you are essentially adding its BOM to the job. The “Phantom Routing” field determines which order the Operations are placed. It can be excluded, or set to Before or After the parent Operation.

​@ChrisB have you found a solution for performing multi-level Moves?

I’m a little torn on this issue because we actually want our shop to be performing Moves from lowest levels on up, but they have struggled in certain areas of the shop to understand the proper sequence.

You should do them from the bottom up because the parent item requires the component item to be issued.  Because all of the production orders have the Product production order you could do a business event to fire when the lowest level is reported complete (use AMLowLevel on the stock items to know the hierarchy). The event would have to do am import scenario to issue the item(s) (unless it is backflushed) and another to do the Move.  As each level is closed the BE would repeatedly fire to move up the tree,

​@danielklumpp Not mechanically, but operationally we are changing and it seems to be a positive one. 

Operationally, we are no longer linking production orders into chains, we are building to stock instead. We create a sizeable stock of subcomponents and keep them at higher than normal levels. This way any production order will 9 times out of 10 simply pull from stock material. I’ve been happy to use this as the thin edge of the wedge to get us on some industry standard practices.

We loose the chains of production order links, which does cause a bit of visibility issues with custom to-order parts, but with bulk stock items it has made things simpler for staff. 

The only challenge is the standard “people are resistant to change”. 

​@ChrisB happy to hear you found that changing process instead of software was perhaps a better answer for your organization.  I agree, high volume standard parts should generally be build-to-stock.  For low volume parts, we still use build-to-order and are trying to get better on the shop floor at completing lowest level orders first; it’s a continuing struggle.

Thanks ​@dgodsill97 I would like to look into the AMLowLevel.  We’ve really wanted to be able to display the level in a parent-child hierarchy on a dispatch screen so the Operator can understand for all orders tied into the same Product Production Nbr. which orders they should perform a Move on first, second, third, etc.