Help with Manufacturing BOM

ERPNext
1

Hello,

I have been playing with ERPNext and reading/watching a lot of content. I produce steel shipping racks and I am having a hard time figuring out the best way to enter our BOMs for other operations. Each rack we build is custom to the customers specifications so we would be an Engineer to Order business.

When I am adding items, I add our steel tubing which usually comes in lengths of 24 feet as raw material. These tubes usually have to be cut down to size, lets say we need 4x cut to 18 feet for one rack. Do I add the 18 foot tube as another item, and then create a BOM with the 24 foot tube as the Raw Material, and then add an operation for our “Metal Saw” workstation? Then the BOM on the Rack item, I would just put the 18 foot tube?

A rack could have 20 different lengths of tube on a BOM but can all be produced from the same size raw material. So does every steel tube that need to go through some type of operation need to have its own BOM?

Sorry if that is confusing, I can try to explain or supply screenshots of a current production BOM and a raw material PO if it helps.

Thank you!

2

Why not make a more generic BOM and then your users will have to manually adjust the materials used?

In an ideal case, the materials defined in the BOM will be exactly what is needed. But if you create a more generic BOM, you have a lot less to define, but create a bit more work when actually producing. When you start a work order, you will have to exactly select and enter the materials used, instead of having them correctly being pre-defined.