Comparing Assemblies Across Software - Part 3

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Each Wednesday we focus on topics related to inventory, warehouse management and manufacturing for users of QuickBooks and related software.  On occasion we focus on a specific product, including software products, that provide functionality related to our Warehouse Wednesday focus.

Several weeks ago we started a mini-series on 'assemblies' by looking at QuickBooks desktop products offering this functionality; however, Warehouse Wednesday got side-tracked for a few weeks, and then last week we hopefully got back on-track by taking a comparative look at assemblies examining how assemblies are configured in MISys Manufacturing.

In today’s article we want to look at how ‘assemblies' (assembled items) are configured and tracked in All Orders by NumberCruncher.

All Orders by NumberCruncher provides seamless integration with QuickBooks (desktop) including powerful bi-directional synchronization. Unlike many other 'add-on inventory programs' All Orders allows you to either sync with items in QuickBooks or use aliases. If you sync with items you will see them on QuickBooks transactions, you can still print invoices from QuickBooks, print sales reports and use other integrated applications that require items in QuickBooks. Within All Orders you will see a detailed breakdown of inventory by item, location, bin and serial #, whereas in QuickBooks you will see only the total quantities.) 

The Work Order handles production/manufacturing in All Orders. Work Orders specify which finished goods need to be produced as well as the components required to produce them. Before creating a Work Orders in All Orders you must first create one or more assembly type items. These assembly items contain the Bill of Materials (BOM) that tells All Orders which components are required to make the finished good. Below is an example of a Bill of Materials for such an assembly:

When using All Orders it is necessary to make a series of decisions related to how you will design your bill of materials for your finished goods and sub-assemblies.  These decisions are centered around several options for each configuration. The first concerns whether you will include all sub-assemblies required for your finished good in the same Bill of Materials and use steps to delineate the various sub-assemblies, or whether you will create individual assembly items for each sub-assembly or step in the finished goods production process.

Your decision really boils down to how you (or your client) would answer this question: “Do I produce my entire ‘finished goods’ assembly at the same time, or do I produce and inventory my various sub-assemblies (production steps) so that I can build my ‘finished goods’ at any time in the future from sub-assembles I have produced for stock (inventory).

If the answer is to this question is ‘I produce my entire ‘finished goods’ assembly all at one time, then you typically will design a single Bill of Materials in All Orders that encompasses all of the components rather than creating sub-assemblies and work orders for each step individually.

On the other hand, if you take the approach in production that you produce and stock the various sub-assemblies so that they are available when you get ready to produce your various ‘finished goods’ then you would take the approach in All Orders of creating an assembly item and Bill of Materials for each sub-assembly, and an assembly item that is made up of the various sub-assemblies for your finished good.  

The following Bill of Materials (report) shows an item with thee (3) components, two (2) of which are sub-assembly bill of materials. Of those sub-assembly bill of materials, one of them contains a component that is another sub-assembly with bill of materials.  As such this example is a product that has 3 levels (or stages) of assembly. This indented BOM (shown at the top of the next page) makes clear the multi-level nature of this assembly.

Once you have configured your Assembly items and sub-assemblies, and defined the Bill of Materials for each, you are ready to produce Work Orders in All Orders.  Remember Work Orders are the mechanism by which manufacturing takes place in All Orders in the same way that ‘Assembly Builds’ are the means by which manufacturing takes place in QuickBooks.

When a Work Order is created, All Orders knows how much of each component is required and displays the quantity available for each component on the work order. Some Bills of Materials associated with Work Orders may have several production steps. As we just discussed when looking at how to configure your assembly items and BOMs, production steps allow you to split the BOM into multiple processes.

Work Orders help you track components and manage production, as such the Bills of Materials should always be configured so that the steps are outlined in the required sequence since steps must be finished ‘in sequence’ within an All Orders Work Order. The result of production of a Work Order is the creation of the assembly as specified by the Bill of Materials within the Work Order and the decrement of the various component (or raw) materials. 

Here is an example of a Work Order for fifty (50) widgets based upon the Bill of Materials defined for a ‘Widget’ assembly item.

Note that the status of the steps (shown in the blue box above) is 'Waiting', this means that before any step can begin, the components must be allocated.  A sufficient quantity has not been allocated for the quantity ordered. But All Orders has a resolution for that. If you had lots of items in a Bill of Materials it could become rather cumbersome to allocate a sufficient number of each item on the work order, but All Orders allows you to pick all the available components on the current step or all the steps at the same time.

You can then proceed with putting each step into production; however, if there is no lag between production and finishing a step you can set the status to 'Finished' as can be seen in the example below.

By the way, the Work Order above actually contains an extra component that wasn’t listed on the Bill of Materials. In this case there was not enough stock of Item 7909-0094 so Item 7809-0093 which is an alternate part was added to the Work Order to make up the difference in quantity required. All Orders, like most sophisticated inventory/manufacturing systems, allows you to ‘hot swap’ or ‘substitute’ components on a Work Order without affecting the original bill of materials.

You then continue working your way through the Work Order until all the production steps are finished.

All Orders is a QuickBooks add-on that delivers feature-rich inventory management, sales cycle workflow, production and manufacturing functionality and warehouse management, at a very affordable price. While perhaps not as sophisticated than other inventory or manufacturing solutions cost much more, All Orders does in face provide a significantly more robust feature set than QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Enterprise or QuickBooks Enterprise with Advanced Inventory while at the same time preserving many of the transaction initiation and completion steps that QuickBooks users find most appealing.