About Production

About Production

The production process has a number of very useful capabilities that manage the complexity of production and support accurate planning and scheduling processes. In general, the journey from input materials to finished goods follows a pattern or sequence, with plenty of variation possible.

The production process is initiated by two demand streams:

1. Sales Orders
2. Independent Work Orders

(Note that a number of flags affect production processes.)

Normal Production Sequence

1. A sales order is entered and confirmed, specifying the required finished items, (or an Independent Work Order is created).
2. For each requirement, a SOI is created, requesting a weight or number of pieces of finished material product.
3. For each SOI, a WO is created, specifying the work steps and sequence that are required to process from the input material to the required finished material.
4. Each step requires specialized processing that is accomplished at a work center with the appropriate equipment to perform the required operations.
5. The work center’s list of grouped work orders  is called a Production Order. A single production order may contain work steps from a number of work orders for different customers or for a number of  Independent Work Orders.
6. A processing plan may be associated with a Production Order  to provide details of exactly what to do at each step in production. There are four types of process - Manufacturing, specifiying production Recording, Packaging to describe the packaging process, Transfer, to transfer inventory between locations and Shipping to request and schedule shipments
7. A group of production orders is scheduled through a Production Schedule.
8. Production demand planning is used to monitor the work steps for each work order through the production process, including the allocated input and output material weights from each step.
9. Production Recording is performed as each Production order is processed. Production Recording records start and stop times, the materials actually used and the WIP produced. It also specifies the production loss or wastage that occurred during the production process.
10. Specific material tags can be allocated to the work steps at any stage: during sales order entry, in the Production Order,  or when production recording begins. Production cannot be recorded without the application of real material, however production planning can use dummy tags or generalized ICI specification as placeholders to plan production processing in advance of the actual tagged material being known. As real tags are created, they replace the dummy tags orICI specifications in the production process.
11. When all works steps preceding  the ship or transfer step have been completed, the finished materials are packaged (if packaging is required) and if the production is for a Sales Order, shipped using the Load packaging and shipping process. Finished materials for Independent Work Orders may be added to inventory or transferred.
12. If the production is for a Sales Order, Invoices are created when the material is shipped.

See About Production Processing Exceptions for details about variations to the standard production process