ETO Manufacturing and Inventory Item Maintenance

​@PaulMainard55 - did you get a response on this? If not - reach out via email and we can brainstorm. 

If only Estimates where multi-level!  I think CADLink or CADTalk can create Estimates and Estimates can directly create Production Orders as long as all the inventory items are created.  The advantage avoiding creating Bills of Material for ETO.

Most ETO business I have worked with use Projects and tie the production order for the FG to the project.  Jeremy Sharp of Trebea is working on some Project enhancements to add Materials to Projects.

​@dgodsill97 - thanks for chiming in.  The idea of creating estimates from CADLink has some appeal, and yes, “Muliti-level Estimates” would be an interesting approach. 

Our client will be leveraging project.  We will use the Project-based sales order (maybe) in conjunction with the above.  The question remains; if we were to treat ETO Items similar to how we might do with configurable products, where we create a BOM with nothing but routing, would that be a reasonable approach? 

It’s interesting that you bring-up multi-level estimates/BOMs, because based on our discovery, they phantom route everything and each production order is flattened, although not in the way that you might expect. 

Their legacy system does not assign Materials to Operation Steps/Work Centers.  They added a custom text field to their production order “Materials” section to indicate which work centers the materials pass through.  I actually would prefer that if they either create child ProdOrders, or phantom route properly to truly embed the materials routing before or after parent’s assembly operation.  

My thinking has been along the lines of creating a series of ETO BOMs that includes standard routing along with embedded subassemblies and then use CADLink to update the production order(s), instead of creating unique SKUs and BOMs?  This is following a “configurable” product paradigm, but allowing PDM to be the product configurator.  

I think this requires a longer conversation...

I agree.  Having a “template” BOM would speed things up.since templates were never implemented for bills of material.  Updating Production Details is complex when the order is in process but that may not be a concern.

​@dgodsill97 Oh - it’s a concern.  In fact, I would prefer to simply update Production Details midway through the production order if possible.  ETO revisions midstream are a thing and we’re looking to do just that through CADLink.  With that said, I think that rather than phantom routing, child production orders provides better firewalls in the manufacturing process in cases where a subassembly revision is required.  Easier to do this in a child order than from within a flat phantom-routed work order, would you agree?

I would agree.  There used to be in the help for Production Details a section on what could be changed but the overlords of documentation tossed that out.

Hey Paul, I'm curious how you are going about this, your experience with CADLink, and if you had any thoughts on using the Production Order as the main document for any engineering design work instead of BOMs.

Currently, I’m in the same boat. Our business is a Manufacturing ETO business that produces electrical equipment. We have around 5-8 product lines, but within those product lines are an almost infinite number of custom configurations that are suited to fit our customer’s needs.

As of right now we do something similar where we use a BOM as a template with only the routing, work centers, and parts that are constant for each configuration. We then create the Production Order at the time of SO entry and use that as the driving document to hone in on all the larger components as well as engineering driven components (manufactured and electrical parts).

Then based on communication with the customer, the material within the production order can change or be revised. We also use this production order to drive our engineering drawings as well as 3D models and parts (based off of the contents of the production orders and engineering processes). 

I am just starting to implement our fabrication department and have been exploring CADTalk / CADLink. It has been a struggle to implement the fabricated parts without a 3rd party solution since these parts are typically custom as well and labeled after the specific SO#...would have been to much for one person to constantly load those fab. parts and create BOMs for them without it.

Thank you!
 

Once you start production you are doomed to a life of constant changes:because you needed to start production before all the components are known so you can meet the customer delivery date. 

• the customer has changes.
• The engineers cannot leave things alone.
• A component is not available or not in time and you need to substitute something else.
• A more important customer (the CEO’s golfing buddy) needs some of the components you already issued to the less important customer.
• And of course service needs a part because another customer is down.
• etc.

If you can get CADLink or CADTalk to update production orders that would seem to be good solution,  You can maybe create am import schedule or use the API to update the production materials.

Hahaha, you hit the nail right on the head...those are all situations that we have gone through. It seems that CADLink could be our best option as I believe they are able to edit/add materials in the Production Order level. 

Seems that that may be the best step forward. Thanks!

​@jdunmire  - thanks for reaching out and joining the conversation.  

I don’t have a ton of direct experience with CADLink, but based on my conversations with them, their tool can update both BOMs and Production Orders.

Last year, we took a client live that built prefab, ETO’ed trusses, floors, and walls.  What we decided to do was to create generic SKUs for each of these products as Make-to-Order items, and associating them with nothing but operations/work centers.

Their CAD platform produced a materials listing (more like a cut sheet) in a CSV format that had two line types for each truss; one that identfied the truss by project, floor, and location, the quantity of trusses needed, and the number of pieces of cut lumber, summarized by dimensions.

We used this data to generate the Project Sales Order Lines (trusses) and used a concatenation of Job#, floor, and location in the description, which was passed onto the production order’s description so we could indentify them, while also using that data to preassign the lot number to support specific costing. Also, the lot number serves as the glue to trace the customer’s order to the production order and materials used.

Using the same flat file, we updated the Production Order to add the material lines to their corresponding production orders.  Once the materials were in, we used a GI and import scenario to update the batch sizes in the material lines to match the order quantity so as not to overbudget/over backflush the material. 

We weren’t using CADLink/CADTalk for this, but I got the idea based on my experience using Acumatica’s product configurator, which, at the end of the day, does the same thing; converts the configuration settings to a production order (the materials don’t live in the BOM).  

For the client I’m working on, this may not be a solution and you may find that it might not be a solution for your company either, but it is an option if you see no point in creating stock numbers that will only be used once.  

I think that using a CAD integration makes the issue around managing SKUs, BOMs and the like a little less painful, except the ECOs.  My solution is that if a new subassembly is required, just add it to the production and, if needed, create a child production order for ir.  

Not sure if that helps you, but I feel like ETO products and Configurable products are one in the same, so the priciples in generating production orders can be shared.  

​@jdunmire - by the way, per the other thread we’re engaged in, the path of using child production orders vs phantom routing would almost be a requriement.  If they want to use phantom routing, then you’ll have to have discrete BOMs for your subassemblies.