Good day everyone, I’m fairly new in the ERPNext world, and we are in the early stages of evaluating the system, so far we are quit impressed but I did have a question on the Item Variant and BOM Templates in V13.
If I have an item with variants linked to a BOM Template, is there any way to link the item attribute to a specific BOM Material in the templates?
For example.
Item: BasketBall
Item Attribute: Color
Color: Brown
Color Blue
Color Black
Item Attribute: Size
Size: Small
Size: Medium
Size: Large
Total of 9 variants
BOM Template, my expectation is that I add all my materials (super BOM) and link the Item attribute to it, so when the variant is created, the BOM Template is generated with ht e correct BOM Materials.
this is my expectation, but right now, when I create an item variant, the BOM Template is used a starting point and needs to be modified 9 times with the correct BOM materials.
Perhaps I’m all wrong on this or I’m doing something incorrectly, and if so, can someone point me in the right direction, how does the item variant interact with the BOM Template?
I wish, but I’ve not found the solution to this issue.
Seems pretty straight forward, and perhaps I’ve misunderstood the help file or the BOM Template feature altogether. But my thought/understanding was a exactly as described, Start with a SUPER BOM and link the Attributes to the correct BOM Items, but I’m not sure what went wrong here, and again it may just me and misunderstanding the feature altogether.
Sadly, we abandoned our ERPNext implementation project and haven’t kept up with the progress of ERPNext.
Does anyone have any input on this subject? I’m curious how ERPNext v14 can handle BOM with item variants. Can we generate BOMs based on the variant so a large item will show the additional consumption of material an the correct color material can be associated with the BOM?
My understanding is that when creating variants, the variants inherit the properties of the variant template, and the only unique properties of those variant items are the name (composed of the template name and abbreviations of the attributes), and then the attributes themselves.
I’m not aware of a way to link particular components or bill of material items to specific attributes values.
I suspect you would need to do some customization with custom scripts to apply certain bills of materials depending on attribute values, either at the time of variant generation, or possibly as a batch process afterwards.
We need to first understand the fact that with frappe you can create automation easily, When your items/variants are created, they shall create the respective BOMs accordingly.
Cheers to that.
But here,
The Challenge lies on the functional side.
While creating the item/variant, Do you record/enter anything that reflects the components and their quantities with which the system can generate the respective BOMs?
Although, you can provide the Master BOM, but then does it have any data which shows how it should create the BOMs for its child variant?
Let’s assume the variants are just defined by the size, so each variant BOM will consume different quantities of Raw Material.
Where do we define it?
Then here comes the customisation part, Yes it can be achieved!
Yes, the setup is the tricky part. I assume you’d need custom doctypes that link attributes with a custom BOM, or perhaps various components in a BOM. But it can get complicated, especially if there are multiple attributes, where different combinations of those attributes may create different combinations of BOM components.
Definitely feasible, but not a trivial task. You’d probably need an experienced developer to implement it, for both the doctype setup as well as the scripting to create the actual variants.
Getting this feature done would be the beginning of a Rules Based Product Configurator.
As an ETO manufacture, item attributes and BOM creation with rules (formulas) would be a serious game changer for ERPNext IMHO.
Yes, definitely a valuable feature. But a rules-based product or BOM configurator can be a rabbit hole. We developed a product configurator for internal use (to build configure-to-order computer systems), and it ended up taking a few hundred programming-hours by the time we were done. Getting that sponsored & developed for ERPNext is unlikely in the short/medium term.
There are entire software companies built around developing & selling CPQ systems with even more flexibility, designed to integrate with commercial ERPs.
But for the OP’s fairly straightforward example of linking attributes to certain BOM materials, that seems more manageable.
Also looking forward to this, my company easily generates 12000 variants for each product. Generating each BOM manually for each variant is just impossible.
Yes, I can see how that would create a large number of variants quickly. I can see why you wouldn’t want to try to manually create that many BOMs.
The only 2 options I can think of are:
Create the thousands of variants, then programmatically create thousands of corresponding BOMs, one for each variant (either through the Frappe framework, or directly to the database using SQL), or
Create a custom configuration app that doesn’t use the standard variant feature, but instead creates customized configurations for your signs, which then can create custom BOMs when you put them into production (kind of what we did for custom computers).
Unfortunately, neither of these is a trivial task, but option #1 would use more “vanilla” ERPNext functionality.
You know any way I could start with the first option?
To generate so many boms, I’m guessing I would have to link an attribute value with a raw material, right?
There has to be a way to associate the attributes with the boms somehow to generate them automatically.
For now I’m thinking the only way is to just not use BOMs for my situation, or not use Erpnext altogether, which is sad. I spent already much time understanding and customizing.