134 -  Assembly & Production Orders in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Assembly & Production Orders in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Today I kind of want to go into a topic that's been kicked around a little bit, basically if you are thinking about making something in the system. Turning raw material into a finished good, you have a couple of options. One of the is doing production order or manufacturing and the other one is assembly orders. What are the actual differences though?, I’m just gonna go into that a little bit here.

Production BOM
If I go into departments, we have a whole manufacturing system here, this has production orders, capacity planning, all kinds of really neat things, so its a full-fledged production system has everything or mostly everything you need. But you can’t see anything here about assemblies, it does not even have a line in our main menu.

But assemblies are definitely worth looking into. If I go into the item list right here we can see that we have something called production BOM, so if it has a production Bill material and it has a production BOM and its created with the production system and then we have something called assembly BOM right next to it so if it has an assembly bom it is created with the assembly system, so two different things, kind of crazy.

Lets go ahead and take a look at the break here, I know we are coffee company but we for some reason do auto parts or bicycle parts in this case, so if we go into replenishment; this is made with the production order; and I go into the production Bill material I get that here, going to advanced, I get into the production Boms, the production BOM will contain the actual items for making a production order.

Assembly BOM
And then what about the assembly?. If I actually close out of there, I also have the assembly bom here and if I actually sort it so I see yes, I can see these are all the assembly boms that we have in the system. So this one, the loudspeaker has both, the production bom and the assembly bom, which is kind of interesting, but anyway; let's go with the storage system.

We can actually navigate into the assembly boms, and you can see its very similar. We have a list of ingredients in here, what is really the difference?, the difference is: Mostly assembly bomb is like kidding, you can actually put in items, you could actually resources, which is labor, but that's about it.

You will make exactly what you said you are gonna make when you are making the assembly bomb, so you don't have a Bill material production below material there, you could actually say you are going to use five and you ended up using six, and that's ok, it just accumulates the cost. Whereas in the assembly bomb you have to use five, you’ll always use exactly what you have. That's one big difference, it's just a lot less sophisticated.

Another difference is the capacity, so if I go into the production system again, go into departments and go into capacities. Here we have machine center and work centers, and you can assign the jobs what we call routes to each one of the work centers to actually perform the production.

This does not exist in the assemblies, they don't have anything close to that, there is no assignment to a work center or a machine center, there are no routes, it's kind of like a recipe, the recipe has two parts. The first is what you punt in the recipe, the second part is how you do it, like what processes it goes through. In the assembly you only have the ingredients that go in, you don't have any of the methods being measured, so no capacity planning in the assemblies. This is a huge part.

Planning in manufacturing
Also, we have something called planning in manufacturing, so there is a planning worksheet where you calculate the need to actually make the finish good, so you have an MRP or MSP and you don’t have that in the assembly orders either. You do have some minor planning in the assemblies but not as sophisticated as this.

That's kind of the high level you take on these two items. What I actually wanted to do is go deeper into this in subsequent videos, since manufacturing seems to be a hot topic, there is a lot of views on the manufacturing videos, so I would like to do it better justice and kind of dive into the differences between assembly orders and the actual manufacturing a little bit furthers.

I hope you get something out of this, basically, the assembly orders are good for just putting together, not with any type of assignment to machine centers work centers or any type of resource planning. Whereas the production order itself can do much much more.