While material ID's can be readily added, changed or deleted in routing maintenance, that operation does nothing to update the bill of material. Clicking the BOM button on the maintain routing header will temporarily show you the updated BOM, but even if you save the routing, the bill of material will remain unchanged.

Regeneration documentation suggests it will update the bill of material, but that is utterly false. In fact, Regeneration only updates unit costs of materials, and even then only those materials in the most recent Cost Rollup, not in the current Routing.

The reality is that MAS500 requires FOUR separate steps to update a single-level BOM:
1) Perform Maintain Routing, to a add/change/delete material itemid's
2) Perform Cost Rollup, to generate BOM reflecting changes in step 1
3) Perform Regeneration, to update unit costs of items generated in step 2
4) Perform Cost Rollup, to update BOM with changes reflected in steps 2 and 3

Needless to say, multi-level BOMs require multiple iterations of these four steps.

Among the solutions is to provide users the ability, perhaps using the BOM button on the maintain routing screen, to actually upate the BOM structure, the component unit costs, and the regenerated BOM in a single step.

This would benefit any user interested in saving time, but would be especially beneficial to those in the food industry where alternate ingredients are often substituted in the face of volatile commodity costs.

by: William H. | over a year ago | 2 - Manufacturing