Maintaining hardware and software version in BOM history

Hi All,

We are manufacturing products which includes few hardware component and also a firmware.
The component inside and also firmware are getting developed and updated regularly. All components and final assembled product are serialised.

We would need to keep track of what version of the software and hardware has gone into which serial number of final product we have sold for guaranty and support purposes.

What is the best way to setup system for this situation?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Saeed

Set up the firmware as a non stocked Item and create a BOM for the upper level product?

Keeping revisions is tricky in the system since it has no built in functionality. I created custom fields for “Part Number” and “Revision,” then wrote a script to combine the two into the “Item Number.” Seems to work good for what I need.

Hi @agerken

thanks for your reply. Can you please explain the first line a bit more? Do you mean like software to have a BOM which has version as child component? And each time version gets updated then you do add a new item to this BOM and remove previous version notion?

On second solution with the custom field. Do you still need to update the BOM each time you get a new version?

I guess my biggest issue is that I have 32 variations of a product which can be ordered based on the combination of features customer can choose. Then each of these variations have a BOM associated to them. Now if each time a new version released, someone need to update these BOMs manually then it gonna be a big task.

I guess it comes down to this question: Is there any field from the Item table that serial history table copies at the PO time and can be used for this purposes?

For example “Purchase / Manufacture Details” section information seems to be internal to Serial No. history table. So if i change my supplier for this item today it won’t effect what you see here for old products and still original supplier and price etc will be shown here.

But Item name and code and description are read from Item table at the time of report. So if i update the description of the item today it will effect what you see on this page for old serial numbers.

Can you please explain the first line a bit more? Do you mean like software to have a BOM which has version as child component? And each time version gets updated then you do add a new item to this BOM and remove previous version notion?

On second solution with the custom field. Do you still need to update the BOM each time you get a new version?

I guess my biggest issue is that I have 32 variations of a product which can be ordered based on the combination of features customer can choose. Then each of these variations have a BOM associated to them. Now if each time a new version released, someone need to update these BOMs manually then it gonna be a big task.

Yes, what I suggested was to create an Item for the firmware and put it on a BOM for the upper assembly. Yes, you would update the BOM when you updated Firmware revision.

Yes, my second point was only how to create revision control in the Item Code. However, this could easily be done with Item Attributes as well.

If you have 32 variations you should use Item Attributes and Variants to track them.

I’m not sure what you’re asking in your second post.