Introducing Production Orders

A production order generally defines which material is to be produced, in which quantity, at which time, and in which way.

In our business example, production orders are used to initiate and control the production of the bicycles in our bicycle company. The individual production orders define the following information:

• Which types of bicycles are to be produced?
• Which quantities are to be produced?
• At which production time?
• Which material components are required?
• Which operations are to be carried out at which work centers?

In order to be able to create production orders, various master data must have been created beforehand. The main master data required are:

• Materials
• Bills of material (BOM)
• Routings
• Work centers
• Production resources/tools (PRT)
• Production versions

Material master records must be created for the materials that are produced and procured in a company. In our bicycle company, for example, material master records were created for the finished bicycles, for the required assemblies that are produced in-house, such as frames or wheels, and for raw materials to be procured via purchasing, such as chains or metal tubes. In the material master record of each item, planning data, procurement data, execution-relevant data, and so on, are maintained.

The material components required for finished products and assemblies are to be defined via bills of materials (BOMs). The bill of material for a bicycle manufactured in our bicycle company can, for example, consist of the material components frame, wheel, chain, and further components. Assemblies, such as the frame of a bicycle, themselves have a BOM, which results in multi-level BOM structures.

You furthermore define in a BOM how many components are required to assemble a product. For example, one bike requires the assembly of two wheels, front and rear wheel, respectively.

Routings define in detail the operations to be carried out to manufacture a finished product or an assembly. For example, a routing for the production of a bicycle can consist of the operations Pre-assembly, Assembly, and Quality Inspection.

A work center is assigned to each operation to define the physical location where this operation is to be processed. By assigning a work center, you also specify costing- and planning-relevant parameters for the individual operations since the master record of a work center contains essential information that is used for capacity planning, scheduling, and costing of production orders. In our example, the Pre-assembl of the bike is executed at work center Assembly I, the operation Assembly is executed at work center Assembly II, and so on.

Furthermore, production resources/tools (PRTs) can be assigned to an operation. A production resource/tool assigned in the operation Assembly can be, for example, a detailed Assembly Instruction illustrating the main assembly steps to the worker.

A production order for a finished product or an assembly is always created with reference to a production version of the corresponding material. A production version defines which routing in combination with which bill of material is to be used for the production order. A suitable production version is automatically selected when the order is created according to criteria such as production quantity and production time.

In a nutshell, the structure of a production order consists of header, operation, and component data: The header data contains general information that applies to the entire order, such as the product and the quantity to be manufactured. Each production order always has a standard sequence of operations. Parallel sequences can be used to define operations to be processed in parallel. The component overview is based on the selected BOM and lists the assemblies and raw materials required for production. Each material component is always assigned to an operation. By default, the material components are assigned to the first manufacturing operation. However, you can also manually assign components to different operations in the routing or directly in the order if, for example, you need the components at a later point in time.

In the example, the first production operation is executed. Afterward, the order flow branches and the subsequent operations are executed in parallel. Finally, the branches converge and the last production operation is executed. To some assembly-relevant manufacturing operations, there are components assigned. However, there are also operations in the order without component assignment, for example in-process quality inspection steps or steps in which you finally assemble components which were pre-assembled in an earlier step.