Synopsis:
Learn how to use substitutions, and to adjust the manufacturing BOM from the customer order.
Webinar transcript
APT University: Custom manufacturing – BOM Changes from Sales Orders
Hello everyone and welcome to APTU, Today we;ll be discussing one way to do a custom manufacturing workflow by setting up customized Bills of material right from the sales order. This feature essentially allows a salesperson to make an on-demand work order to the exact specifications that your client needs.
We will be taking any questions at the end, so if you do have a question, feel free to put it into the live chat available just to the side, or just below the video, and if you want to learn more about advancepro we have our full archive of APTU videos on localhost/apt under the resources tab, or on our youtube channel. We have a lot of other videos on our manufacturing feature, and it’s very flexible, so I encourage you to take a look.
I should mention that this is for quick, on-the-fly custom work. If you’re going to build something out in a CAD program and export a CSV, you might want to take a look at our BOM importing video.
So to begin with, you’re going to need a generic Assembly item, I’ve built one here called custom item. This item can be totally blank, or it can be a template or base model for the finished products, without the customizations applied.
Now let’s start a sales order, and we’ll add our custom item to the order, and if we enable duplicate skus, we can actually add it twice, and customize each item independently.
So now we have two copies of this item on the order, and we can click the Bill of Materials button to view and change the BOM for each of these pieces, when we add the click the bill of materials here keep in mind that we’re changing the amount required to produce a single item, and just for the line item we’re editing.
Here you can see that one of our components is variable-type, so we can change the amount we’re going to use. You can see I’ve also created a substitution rule on this BOM, so if I wanted i could click on that item and completely substitute this item for another as well.
For more information on variable items and substitutions you might want to watch our full video on BOM setup.
Finally, at the bottom we can actually add items that are not on the bill of materials at all. And change the quantities there as well, you’ll notice we get a price column for the extra pieces, which can help your salesperson make quotations on the extra items.
Lets go ahead and save our bill of materials settings.
So now we have two custom build items on this sales order, one that has standard settings, which is the one we haven’t changed at all, and one with several changes and customizations, we can still change the quantities for each, and when we complete this order, we’ll actually get separate work orders, one for the regular items, and one for the modified items. This also works just fine if we modify different items in several different ways, we’ll get one work order for each line item we set up.
Now I’ve also gone ahead and included Item notes as a custom field so that it’s clearer to sales, picking, and billing teams which customized item goes to this customer, and the salesperson can go ahead and put a note in here, this is completely customizable.
Now lets go ahead and process the order. On the processing screen, we’ll set each line item to create a manufacturing work order. And when we click process, you’ll see that two work orders were created. If we go and look at them, one of the work orders is a standard build, and one is a customized build.
So you can see how your assembly and manufacturing teams can now seamlessly take instruction from your sales team using this feature. And commence building products as needed. Once the build is complete the Sales order can be moved into the shipping phase, and then shipped out to your client. For more on that, take a look at our backorder management video.
This concludes today’s tour of the custom manufacturing features for sales team members.