Dynamics 365 Business Central – Basic Manufacturing Part 1

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Today we’re going to be going over basic manufacturing in part one of this manufacturing video. We will review the basic components of the manufacturing system. My name is John Hoyt, Solutions Specialist for Technology Management Concepts. Let’s get started!

In this video we will cover:

How to work with a manufactured item
How to create a bill of materials for the item
How to create a routing for the item
How to work with the capacities
1. Work centers
2. Machine centers
3. Outsourced vendors

In part two of this video we’ll cover the manufacturing orders.

So I’ve jumped over to my Business Central system and the first thing I’m going to do is change my settings, because I want to move myself out of the Business Manager role. I’m going to instead use the Production Planner role.

Let’s start with the item setup itself that’s located in the product design drop down and I’ll pull up my list of items. I’ll search through here real

quickly for the item we’re going to work with today. I’m going to build this gas plasma chamber system so I’ll drill down into the item itself. Now a manufactured item when you create them is no different than a standard item you’d use just for basic inventory supply chain purposes with one critical difference and that’s down in the replenishment section of the inventory master. Here my replenishment system is set to production order. I’m telling Business Central I’m going to manufacture this item as opposed to simply purchasing it or creating it as a kit using an assembly or something of that type. Now when I tell Business Central I want to use production order I need to specify some values here in the production section of replenishment. First is my manufacturing policy. I can choose to either make to stock or make to order. Make an advance and store it on the

shelf. That’s the make to stock model. Make to order is wait for the demand to be presented and then I will make when that demand does show up on a sales order. You can have different production manufacturing policies for different manufactured items. I need two additional pieces of information in order to make this item. I need to specify the route. This is the path that the components will need to take through the manufacturing floor with different work centers, machine centers, people adding labor etc. as it moves through the manufacturing steps and the production bomb, or the bill of materials is essentially the list of ingredients. What goes into this particular finished good? That can be a single level bill of materials where I do nothing but pull components. It could also be a multi-level bill of material where I need to pull in a different manufactured item as a sub-assembly and I’ll show you an illustration of those in just a moment. So, once I’ve told business central how or when to make my item through the

manufacturing policy, how it’s going to go through the shop floor and what items go into the finished good… I also need to specify how do I want to consume those raw materials those components those sub-assemblies and that’s done with the flushing method. You can set it to manual as I have here which requires a user to go in at each point in the route and specify how many items they pulled, how many items they consumed, or you could use an automated method, such as a forward or backward flushing. Forward flushing basically says at the point of the pick I’m going to consume all the raw materials and components needed. Backward does the same operation at the closing of the manufacturing order and we’ll talk about that in more detail in video number two. Then down at the bottom you can also include if you want an additional pick step- a formal process that someone needs to go through as they pick material out of the stock room or out of the raw materials section. That completes everything that we need at the item setup level.

So now what I want to talk about are the production billing material and the route. How do I make this and what components go into that, so I’ll navigate to the production bomb list. I’ll find my finished good, open up that bill of material at the general level, I’m simply describing what I’m going to make, what is the unit of measure I’m going to use as the finished good output, and if I’m tracking version control I can also look back at archived versions how was this item built in the past because I may have had changes or substitutions over time within the individual line items that go into making my finished good. Here I’ve specified four different line items. the quantity of each that goes into the finished good their unit of measure. All of my items are discrete so I don’t have any scrap percentage but if I was adding in so many feet of electrical cable or something of that type I may want to include a scrap factor to make sure that I pull more than enough material out from the stock room to ensure i can manufacture the items successfully. Finally, the production bill and material here is I line item 5. This refers to a subassembly that has its own finished good bill of material has its own route and in order to make the final finished good. I’ll have to have at least one of the sub-assembly available. Once I have my production bomb ready to go, I’ll need to have a route specified how am I going to make that.

And here I have just a single stage inside my route just one operation at a single work center. With that as part of my costing model, if I need to include setup time, run time, wait move times etc. i can use this as part of

the demand planning and in terms of managing the capacities down on the shop floor. So now i have the route established for how I build this item the bill of material tells me what goes into it i’m now ready to actually go into the manufacturing process. That is going to include a couple of additional pieces i want to talk about you can define work centers where specific operations will occur. You can have capacity limits for what can be processed within a given period of time. You can incorporate this information into the shop calendar and then my route can specify I move material from one work center to the next with their individual capacities their timings etc. i can also capture data for each one of these work centers as a production order makes its way through the system. A machine center very similar to a work center but here I’m really focused on

the actual machines that are going to be involved when it’s available, what costs to associated whether these are direct or indirect costs and again having these details allow me to build out a more accurate cost model as I go through my manufacturing operations.

Finally, if necessary i can use vendors to specify an outsourced vendor that I might be working with maybe i have a particular operation that’s required but i cannot do internally, chrome plating as an example, I can define from my vendor list which outsourced vendor i want to use for that operation and even include that outsourced operation as part of the route for the production of that finished good material.

Okay in this video then we’ve worked with:

The manufactured items
The bills of material
The routings
The various capacities

that are available in business central, the work centers the machine centers and the outsourced vendors. In part two we’ll move on to the manufacturing orders themselves.

That wraps up this video if you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video please comment down below i’ll do my best to answer your comments and if you need immediate technical support i invite you to visit our website abouttmc.com also don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel.