This is EXACTLY the point @JayRam !!!
The ERPNext deve team “started” to develop a manufacturing module by creating the BOM and Production Order processes. However, they never finished the job. A live production environment CANNOT operate properly without a way to handle unexpected variable output. You can’t build scrap into the BOM because you will never know how much (if any) scrap there might be.
You suggest working without a BOM as a way to manage this scrap process. If I have to work without a BOM then what good is your manufacturing module?!? It isn’t any good and that is my point!
Regardless of the reason, this thread never received an answer and it only further proved my other point about problem persisting for over 4 years now. Did that sink in? …over 4 YEARS NOW.
I no longer market ERPNext to my clients as a manufacturing management tool because it fails miserably.
In a perfect world where everything is always just right, the ERPNext manufacturing module might be passable. The reality of everyday manufacturing is a vastly different world.
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Production orders almost never end exactly even because the raw materials going into them have their own variable quality. The more we come to depend on materials made in China, the worse this problem gets every year.
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Humans make mistakes. Whether that be in counting incorrectly the number of washers they add to a bolt, or how much mild acid they are supposed to add to a weed killer formula, or how much of that special mild acid they spill on the manufacturing floor and loose down the drain. All of these are real everyday events that MUST be able to be resolved by the lower lever employees in the process. When you have a manufacturing floor with 50 employees making products and you are issuing 100 to 125 Production Orders per day to the workers on the line, then you had better have a fast and effecient way to handle scrap and way to return unused materials back to stock when a production order ends prematurely.
Currently this requires the intervention of someone with higher level accounting authority in the system to make MANUAL adjustments to the cost of unused materials and the movement of them back to inventory.
This is a ridiculous approach to manufacturing. Every REAL ERP system that handles Manufacturing has simple Production Order rectification pages that allow workers to successfully complete a production order without making the entire original amount and to list the items on the BOM that were either bad or otherwise unusable while allowing the rest of the materials to be moved back into inventory all with a single submit. This way the worker on the production line can continue working his shift without impacting the rest of the work he is supposed to complete for the day.
In each case the production orders that have ‘exceptions’ for the ay are reviewed by the production manager and appropriate comments are added to the closed production order to explain what went wrong.
No matter how you look at this, working outside the regular BOM and Manufacturing process is NOT going to properly allow you to get accurate reporting about how your efficient your manufacturing processes are running. THAT is the whole reason people use ERP systems in the first place.
So am I frustrated? Of course I am.
In my opinion the entire Manufacturing module should go back to being Beta and taken off the official list of working modules until the developers and the foundation decide they want to actually have a real Manufacturing module and invest in the time to finish it the way it should have been done years ago.
That pretty much says it all. If you cannot use a BOM then you really do NOT have a Manufacturing process in your ERP system.
Scrap management is NOT something you can build in at the beginning of a Production Order unless you are doing something like cutting out wodden toys from lumber. In that one case I can see your current method ‘maybe’ working. If you buy lumber by the linear meter and you only use 70cm of a linear board to make a product, then the remaining 30% is always going to be waste. However, those perfect scenarios are the exception and not the rule.
So… yeah I did give up. I do not believe anyone is paying attention to this except for the few of us that actually tried to use it in a live manufacturing environment.
The saddest part of this is I actually have one client that decided they LIKED the idea of having to scrap all the remaining raw materials left in a incomplete production order. They Liked it because they figured out they could track the real materials in a spread sheet outside the system and use it to hide money from their government.
So is that how you want ERPNext to be known, as the system that gives you a fraudulent path through manufacturing so you can hide money? You almost force them into it with the current configuration. It was the actions of this customer that caused me to stop implementing ERPNext in manufacturing locations. An ERP system should never make it easy to perpetuate fraud. They were supposed to be designed to do the opposite.
The current state of Manufacturing in ERPNext is horrible and incomplete.
I do not even want to try to engineer the fix for this myself. I have done similar things for other parts of the core system and had the PR’s rejected because someone didn’t like how something was done. So, I will not invest the many thousands of dollars it would take to finish the module for you. I have thrown away enough money in rejected PR’s already and have lost my drive for it.
So, again… yes, I give up.
BKM