"Produce items according to BOM", backorders and committed stock

rickk

Hi,

Is it possible to base the "committed" amount of a product/material based on the number of orders with that item in backorder when the option "Produce items according to BOM " is enabled?

Some background:

I'm evaluating Product Levels. Our use case is that we often have a little bit of stock of finished products, but when that runs out customers can backorder more and we need to manufacture them.

The "Produce items according to BOM" option works okay for this case, except that we do not have an easy way to see how much materials we need for the items in backorder.

It would be great if the "committed" column in Manufacturing central would show that, especially because I think it doesn't have function in "Produce items according to BOM"-mode?

Or do you recommend a different way of working for this use case (small amounts of finished products in stock, manufacturing needed for backorders) ?

Thank you,

Rick

japiera

Hi rickk ,

Thanks for your post.

The Committed, Shortage and Free to Use fields and columns were created to show relevant information when working with Product Levels. However, they no longer make sense after we included the ‘Produce Items’ utility when it is active.

We have no plans to change the operation of these columns. Indeed, we had no time to remove these columns and fields when we released this feature, but we're working now on hiding them when the "Produce Items" option is active to prevent possible misunderstanding.

We also do not plan to add columns like the one you're asking for in the medium term. Therefore, you would need to contact a good developer to help you add this column.

Perhaps you can achieve what you want by clicking on the "Show hierarchy tree" in Manufacturing Central. It shows a tree with all the products linked to a BOM, including the stocks and linked quantities (see the image). In it, you can check that you'd need 10 items (5 x 2) of the BOM product to produce the needed quantity of parent products,

I hope this helps.

Best Regards,
José Andrés

rickk

Thank you for the clear answer.

Since this is not an option, I'm wondering if it would be possible to achieve my goal if I add the multiple inventories plugin?

In a nutshell: setup an inventory for finished products with a higher priority than the main inventory, and leave the main inventory BOM controlled?

japiera

Hi rickk ,

You're welcome,

Yes, that would work.

You're exactly describing Scenario 2.1 in our knowledge base article about the "Produce Items according to BOMs" functionality.

You can create as many inventories in your parent products (indeed, you can add a new inventory every time you produce items if you want to), and set the order in which you want them to be sold using the "Inventory Selling Priority".

While the BOM Stock control option is enabled, the Main Inventory will continue having its stock automatically calculated from its linked BOMS.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,
José Andrés

rickk

Thank you Jose,

With this scenario there's one problem and that's when customer wants to order a more than the amount in "finished products" inventory.
So if I have 1 item in stock, and the customer wants to order 2 this is not possible because woo seems to only look at the highest priority stock and tells the customer the product is out of stock.

(The customer could place an order for 1 item from the finished products inventory, and then an order for another item in the main inventory, but obviously that's not very customer friendly)

A workaround could be enabling backorders on the finished product inventory, but then I'm pretty much back to my initial problem - I'm unable to track how much materials I need to buy for backorders.

Is there another way to handle this case? To summarize:

an inventory of "finished products" with the highest priority and "Produce items according to BOM" enabled
main stock BOM controlled
1 item on stock in the "finished products" inventory
Customer wants to buy a quantity of 2 items
I want to see how much BOM materials I need to order for the 1 item that is not in stock

Thanks for your help.

japiera

Hi rickk ;

Well, you can achieve that by ordering the inventories using the Inventory Sorting Mode and the Inventory Iteration set to "Use next in priority order".

Let me show an example:

The product above has two inventories. We ordered the inventories manually and set the secondary one (with stock 1) as the first in priority.

78 units in stock will be displayed on the front end. If the customer buys 2 units, the order will show the item in the backend split into two inventories:

As you can see, the Main Inventory's BOM tree will show the BOMs you need to order to manufacture the products. Please note that the BOMs will already have been deducted from stock.

You can find all our documentation about ATUM Multi Inventory in our knowledge base: https://stockmanagementlabs.crunch.help/en/atum-multi-inventory

I hope this answers your question. Please tell us if you have additional questions.

Best Regards,
José Andrés