Re: Manage item versions in production

Hi Eric,

Thank you for your fast reply.

I’m new to the forum, so excuse me for posting this thread to the wrong place. Where should I move it?

Answering your questions:

Yes, we have 5 basic products (FG = finished goods), and from them we can produce a large number of variants, which are different from each other by colour (60 different) and options (80 accessories in several combinations).

We have developed our own add-on to handle the variants, each variant has it’s own item code and bill of material in the system. Due to the large numbers of options and colours, we do not save all of the possible combinations in advance, we generate them when they are ordered.

In the configurator add-on we can search in the properties of the existing variants, so in just a few moments we know whether our customer ordered a completely new variant or an existing one. Our configurator doesn’t allow duplicates, it has rules and logic programmed in it to help the user.

We found, that the best way to handle the configurations is to give them individual item codes. To be honest, I’m not so familiar with barcodes (using barcodes hasn’t been planned at our company), but your alternative is very interesting.

In case your suggestion about barcodes can „help or support” the above mentioned variant configurator, please provide more details.

By the way is your alternative related to sales point of view or manufacturing view, because – I think – we have problems with last one. The configurator can handle variants from the sales side, but my question relates to bom of the different variants of the FGs.

Let me explain, here is an example of a variant and it’s bom:

If there is a significant engineering modification on the „123v10” component, it’s version number will change, for example to V2.0 and it will be a new item “123v20”, because we have to separate it’s stock from the stock of V1.0.

Although this change won’t result a new variant, because neither the sales department nor our customers need to know that there has been any modification in the component level of the variants.

The other occasion is that we do not want to generate too many variant item codes, since it cannot be handled after a certain number.

Remark: engineering changes are made quite often, so their administration is already a great task on the component level (Engineering and production planning department), we do not want this to occur extra tasks at other departments.

Referring to the above written, there is a period when both versions (depending on their stock) could be in use to produce the same FG variant (8130023). To be precise, there are many variants (bom of variant) that can be involved in an engineering modification, so it’s a difficult question how to manage the above in SAP B1.

I’m not sure but, as far as I know SAP R/3 handles this problem with alternative boms and production versions. Is there a complete solution for SBO like this?

Remark: every manufacturer who tracks it’s production has a need of using versions and revisions and manage them during material resource planning, so as per our opinion our expectation is not really special.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Ferenc