Manufacturing Light

DOCUMENT SUMMARY SHEET

Document Type: How To

Document Title: Manufacturing Light
Document Summary:
File Name: HowTo Manufacturing Light v3.odt
Created on: Friday, 18 November 2011
Created by: P Bowden
Last Modified on: Friday, 18 November 2011
Last Modified by: S Sackett

NOTES

1. Responsibility is disclaimed for any loss or damage (including but not limited to damage resulting from
the use by the client of the document) suffered by any other person for any reason at all including but
not limited to negligence by ADAXA Pty Ltd (ADAXA).

2. Whilst this document is accurate to the best of our knowledge and belief, ADAXA cannot guarantee the
completeness or accuracy of any description or conclusions based on the supplied information.

3. The recommendations contained in the document are advisory and ADAXA has no responsibility for the
management or operation of any recommendations that may be implemented by the client.

4. This document is licensed under the terms shown at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-

nd/3.0/au/legalcode.

© 2011 Adaxa Pty Ltd Page 1

Table of Contents
Adempiere Manufacturing Light

1.1 What is 'Adempiere Manufacturing Light'?....................................................................4

1.2 What kind of Organisations can use it?.........................................................................4
1.3 What functionality is available in Manufacturing Light?.................................................4
The Manufacturing Light Menu Items

2.1 Quality Test................................................................................................................... 8

2.2 Part type....................................................................................................................... 9
2.3 Parts and BOMs........................................................................................................... 9
2.3.1 Part Tab................................................................................................................. 9
2.3.2 BOM Product Report:...........................................................................................11
2.3.3 Bill of Materials Tab..............................................................................................12
2.4 Validate BOM Flags.................................................................................................... 12
2.5 Verify BOM................................................................................................................. 13
2.6 Rollup BOM Cost........................................................................................................ 14
2.7 BOM Product Substitute............................................................................................. 14
2.8 BOM Viewer................................................................................................................ 15
2.9 Indented BOM Report................................................................................................. 16
2.10 MRP and Replenishment............................................................................................ 17
2.10.1 Basic Replenishment Report................................................................................18
2.10.2 Document Types Created by Replenishment......................................................18
2.11 Generating Production Orders for Components/Sub-Assemblies...............................19
2.12 Production (Single Product)........................................................................................ 19
2.12.1 Production Tab.....................................................................................................20
2.12.2 Sales Order Line Related to a Production Order.................................................21
2.12.3 Production Line Tab.............................................................................................21
2.12.4 Outside Processes...............................................................................................22
2.12.5 Control of Items at Outside Processors...............................................................23
2.12.6 QC Test Tab.........................................................................................................23
2.13 Engineering Changes................................................................................................. 24

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 2.13.1 Attached Documents and Drawings.....................................................................26
2.14 Additional functions:.................................................................................................... 26
Adaxa's Offices and Contacts

3.1 Australia..................................................................................................................... 27
3.2 New Zealand............................................................................................................... 27
3.3 United States of America............................................................................................ 27

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 1 Adempiere Manufacturing Light

1.1 What is 'Adempiere Manufacturing Light'?

Adempiere Manufacturing Light is an Adempiere module developed by Adaxa to meet the needs of
manufacturing organisations that do not have the present need or perhaps capability to implement a full MRP2
compliant production system.

The module is intended for organisations that are perhaps:

migrating from a very primitive MRP system

presently using a simple accounting system and lots spreadsheets
do not have the internal skills to manage a full MRP2 manufacturing system.

The implementation of a full MRP2 system in such organisations as described above frequently does not lead to
a successful outcome. Manufacturing Light is intended to provide the opportunity for a staged implementation
and permit organisations to implement Adempiere now with a manufacturing system that meets present needs
and skills and allows the opportunity to move to the full MRP2 based manufacturing capabilities of Adempiere
at a time that suits their needs.

1.2 What kind of Organisations can use it?

Present users of the system (or its earlier versions) are engaged in manufacturing the following:

forensic science instruments and liquid light guides

atomic absorption spectrometers
'Masterbatch additive used for colouring or imparting other properties to plastics
processed natural fibre products, developed from waste and by-products from the sugar,
forestry and paper industries

1.3 What functionality is available in Manufacturing Light?

A comparison of the functionality in typical MRP2 systems with the functionality in Manufacturing Light is shown
in the table below.

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 Manufacturing
Function MRP2
Light

Master production schedule (MPS) 

Item master data (technical data)  

Bill of materials (BOM) (technical data)  

Production resources data (manufacturing technical data)  

Inventories and orders (inventory control)  

Purchasing management  

Material requirements planning (MRP)   (1)

Shop floor control (SFC) 

Capacity planning or capacity requirements planning (CRP) 

Standard costing (cost control)  

Cost reporting / management (cost control)  

Business planning  (3)

Lot traceability  

Contract management  (3)

Tool management 

Engineering change control   (2)

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 Manufacturing
Function MRP2
Light

Quality Control  

Configuration management   (2)

Shop floor data collection  

Sales analysis and forecasting  

Finite capacity scheduling (FCS) 

Notes
(1) Manufacturing Light does not provide time-phased planning of purchased or manufactured products.
(2) Limited functionality.
(3) Other parts of Adempiere may deal with these requirements.

As can be seen from the table, Manufacturing Light does not attempt to deal with time phased activities. If you
are replenishing materials based on usage and the normal min/max values used for purchasing replenishment
the system can suggest replenishment orders necessary to satisfy those max/mins. If you need to manufacture
300 widegets and you have created Production Orders for that quantity, the system will tell you that you need
to create the purchase orders for the materials necessary to make those production orders but it will not tell
you that you can order some for delivery now and some for delivery in a month's time.

Many organisations find that they need to review the plans created by their production management systems
because there are too many variables and changed circumstances to totally rely on system generated
purchasing and scheduling. Such organisations may not find the loss of time phased ordering a major
disadvantage.

Manufacturing Light uses Standard Costing for accounting purposes. Standard Adempiere functionality also
allows the recording of ordering and purchase costing information on many other bases.

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 2 The Manufacturing Light Menu Items

The Adempiere Manufacturing Light module is installed by default under the Material Management section of
the main menu.

There are presently 11 windows added to the standard Adempiere menu structure to address the
Manufacturing Light requirements.

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 2.1 Quality Test
The Quality Test window displays the following:

This window allows the user to define Quality Control tests and associate them with products. The user can
create a test with a description and instructions for performing the test in the Comment/Help field. These
instructions will be visible in the Quality Control tab of the Production window for manufactured products
(described below).

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In the Product tab you can then associate the test with the particular products to which it applies. For each
product you can describe the expected test result required in order for the product to pass the QC test.

2.2 Part type

The Part Type window displays the following:

'Part Type' provides an additional means of categorising products (materials and finished goods) for reporting
and analysis. The Part Type value for a particular product is selected in the Parts and BOMs window.

2.3 Parts and BOMs

The Parts and BOMs window has two tabs, the first displaying the 'parent' product and the second displaying
the 'child' products and their quantities. Both raw materials and finished goods are represented as Products
within Adempiere. The “Parts and BOMs” window displays Manufacturing Light specific information about each
Product, including the Bill of Material setup for manufactured ones. Note that Manufacturing Light BOMs are
stored independently of those created for the full MRP style manufacturing implementation and are limited to
one BOM per Product.

2.3.1 Part Tab

The Part tab displays:

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Most of the fields displayed here are standard Adempiere product fields, the following are the Manufacturing
Light specific fields:

Manufactured: if this flag is set then the replenishment process will create production orders
for restocking this product, otherwise it will be purchased by default.
Kanban Controlled: optional flag to indicate that stock levels for this product are controlled
by Kanban rather than the replenishment process.
Part Type: e.g. raw material, finished good etc. Used for grouping in reports, configured
through the Part Type window.

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 Phantom: this flag signals a BOM product that represents an intermediate assembly that is
not generally stocked or manufactured. Phantom BOMs can be used to break up a large
BOM into logical components, however when a Production for a finished good containing a
phantom BOM is created, the components of the Phantom BOM will be included in the
Production lines in place of the Phantom.
Standard Cost: displays the product's current standard cost as set in the Cost window.

2.3.2 BOM Product Report:

Clicking the 'Report' toolbar button gives access to the Single Level BOM report. This displays information on
the Bill of Materials for the selected product including its components and their Standard Costs.

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2.3.3 Bill of Materials Tab

A Bill of Materials is created by adding components to the Product in the Bill of Materials tab. The
component is entered in the “BOM Product” field and the quantity of the component required to produce a
single unit of the finished product is entered in the “BOM Quantity” field. The BOM components will be ordered
by their “Line No” in printing the Production worksheets.

In addition the following read-only fields provide details about the component product.

Part Type: the component Part Type

Search Key: the component Search Key
Bill of Materials: is the component itself a BOM?
Standard Cost: the standard cost of the component
Std Cost Amount sum: the extended component cost (component Standard Cost x BOM
Quantity)

2.4 Validate BOM Flags

The Validate BOM Flags process displays as:

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The process checks the “Bill of Materials” flag on all products (optionally restricted to a single Product
Category) to ensure all Products that have BOM components defined are flagged as Bills and vice versa.

2.5 Verify BOM

The Verify BOM process displays as:

The process checks for circular references in BOM products, optionally restricted to a single Product or Product
Category, setting the Verified flag on the Part if it passes. “Circular BOM” means where a Parent product's BOM
contains another instance of the parent Product code at a lower level in the Parent products BOM tree.
['unsupported' means that circular BOMs are not allowed]

The “Re-validate” option re-checks the correctness of those Parent products already flagged as Verified.

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2.6 Rollup BOM Cost
The Rollup BOM Cost process displays as:

The process rolls up the component costs for each BOM product for the selected cost element and updates the
cost record accordingly. The process iterates through all the Child products that make up a Parent product and
updates the costs through the whole tree.

Note only Standard Cost elements are currently supported in Manufacturing Light.

2.7 BOM Product Substitute

The process 'BOM Substitute' displays as:

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The process replaces instances of the selected product with the specified substitute product in all Bill of
Materials.

2.8 BOM Viewer

The BOM Viewer form displays as follows in the Java Swing desktop client:

The BOM Viewer allows a Product to be selected and then displays a tree view of either the Bill of Materials
including all sub-assemblies of the selected product.

If the “Implosion” checkbox is selected, the form displays all the assemblies in which the selected component is
used (also known as “Where Used” report). Right-clicking on an entry in the tree gives a menu allowing the
BOM or Implosion for the selected item in the tree to be displayed.

The BOM Viewer is also avaiable in the AJAX browser interface and looks slightly different. In the left hand
pane the products are displayed together with the UOM like [Ea] and the quantity expressed in that UOM.

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2.9 Indented BOM Report
The Indented BOM Report displays as:

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This report outputs information for a Bill of Materials and all its sub assemblies, including cost information. The
“Levels” column shows an indented listing of components. The “Cost” column shows the current standard cost
of the line product, while “Cost LL” shows the rolled up costs of the material components of that line.

2.10 MRP and Replenishment

The Replenishment (incl Production) process displays as:

This process generates a report of products requiring restocking based on total availability and demand. Unlike
the standard Adempiere Replenishment Report the 'stock availability' is calculated to include planned
production and production requirements, based on Production Lines that have been created in Production
Orders where the Production Order is not yet processed.

The following parameters filter the products that will be included in the replenishment:

Business Partner: restrict to products for which the selected Business Partner is set as the
“Current Vendor”
Product Category: restrict replenishment to products in a particular category.

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 Is Kanban: Selecting “No” will exclude products marked as Kanban, selecting “Yes” will
include products flagged as “Kanban”, leaving blank will include both Kanban and non-
Kanban products.
Create <document type>
The remaining parameters control the output of the process.

2.10.1 Basic Replenishment Report

As with the standard Adempiere replenishment choosing value in the “Create” field will automatically generate
documents to fulfill the shortages identified in the report. Leaving the “Create” field as a null will generate a
report of things requiring ordering/production as shown below:

The report can be filtered to show either the manufactured items, the purchased items or both.

2.10.2 Document Types Created by Replenishment

As was shown in the screenshot above the following documents can be created from the Repenishment
process.

Distribution Order

require example....

Inventory Movement

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An inventory Movement is created if a Product is flagged as being replenished from another warehouse.

Production

please refer to section below for more details about Production Orders created by the process.

Purchase Order

The system will directly create Purchase Orders without going through the Requisition step detailed below.

Requisition

A requisition document is created in which quantities can be reviewed and amended. The standard Adempiere
process “Create PO's from Requisition” will generate a Purchase order for each Vendor containing the lines of
the requisition for products for which the Vendor is shown as the 'current supplier'.

2.11 Generating Production Orders for Components/Sub-

Assemblies
The 'Manufacturing Light' version adds the option to to create “Production” in the Replenishment Report
process as shown above. If selected, “Production Order” records will automatically be generated for any stock
that requires replenishment that is flagged as “Manufactured”. As this will generate additional demand for
component parts it is necessary to re-run the Replenishment process multiple times until the lowest level of
components have been reached. The process has required to be run up to 5 times in a system with BOMs
nesting up to 15 levels deep. The first run took about 5 minutes and each subsequent run a lot less time.
[rewriting this process so it is recursive is on the to-do list]

When creating Production from replenishment no Document Type is required

2.12 Production (Single Product)

This is the main window in Manufacturing Light where the production process is managed. The window
displays and manages Production Orders. [the name of the window is easily changed to whatever is the
required terminology in any site]

The reference to (Single Product) indicates that this window has been configured to operate in the manner that
a single production order is for the production of a single 'made' product.

The system also supports the option of allowing a batch header to be created which has multiple Production
Orders in the Batch.

In the Single Product window the displayed tabs are

Production - Production Order for made product

Production Lines - Production Order Lines (ie the components of the BOM)

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QC Test - Quality Control records for the made product

In the multi product window it would display tabs for:

Production Batch
Production - Production Order for made product
Production Lines - Production Order Lines (ie the components of the BOM)
QC Test - Quality Control records for the made product

2.12.1 Production Tab

The Production window displayed above has a two level structure of production header and Production Line.

The following fields define the Production document:

Document No: automatically generated if left blank

Date Promised: for scheduling purposes

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 Movement Date: the date on which the production inventory movements will take place.
Can be reset by “Process Production”.
Product: the finished good to be manufactured.
Locator: the locator where the finished good will be created.
Production Quantity: the quantity to make in the product's base unit of measure.
Create Production Lines: create or recreate the production line details based on the product
Bill of Materials.
Process Production: completes the production, recording all the inventory movements
relating to finished goods and component usage.
The reference section includes standard accounting schema element reference fields dependent on the
accounting schema configuration.

2.12.2 Sales Order Line Related to a Production Order

The Production Order tab will display the Sales Order Line of a related sales order if the Production Order was
created by clicking the “Create Production Order” button displayed on the sales order line after the Sales Order
is completed.

2.12.3 Production Line Tab

Additional Fields:

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 End Product: identifies a line as being the finished product of the manufacturing process.
Automatically set based on whether a production line has the same product and quantity
sign as the header.
Planned Qty: the standard quantity producted/used based on the Bill of Materials set at the
time of the production line creation.
Movement Qty: displayed only for the finished product lines, allows the quantity actually
produced to be entered.
Quantity Used: displayed only for component product lines, allows the quantity actually used
to be entered (as a positive number).
Purchase Order (if the line is for an outside process)

2.12.4 Outside Processes

If a Production Line is for a product that is flagged as an “Outside Process” then a “Create Purchase Order”
button will be displayed in the tab. The user can click the button to automatically generate the draft Purchase
Order for completion by the Purchasing Department. The Order will be created to the Business Partner flagged
as the 'Current Supplier' of the Product.

The Production Line shown below shows the “Production Create Purchase Order” button greyed out as the
relevant Purchase Order 800255 has already been created. The Zoom (to related document) field is displayed
by right-clicking on the PO number. After selecting “Zoom”, the Purchase Order is opened in its window at the

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relevant purchase order line as below:

Note that all the information required by the outside processor is carried into the purchase order line from the
BOM records.

2.12.5 Control of Items at Outside Processors

As shown in the screenshot above, the standard Purchase Order functionality displays on each purchase order
line the qty ordered, qty delivered and qty invoiced. This can be used to manage components that are at
outside processors. Alternatively the Outside Process can be set up as a single BOM and the underlying item
can be 'moved' to an outside process warehouse (one for all suppliers or one for each), the manufacturing
process can be 'completed' in the external warehouse and the product received back into the WIP warehouse.

2.12.6 QC Test Tab

The “QC Test” tab displays as follows:

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The QC Test tab allows quality control test data to be manually recorded against each manufacturing run. The
QC Test tab is only displayed for finished product lines in the Production Window. QC tests are linked to
Attribute Set Instances (e.g. lot/serial numbers) and the QC tests for a particular production line are
automatically generated when the attribute set instance is selected and saved on the production line. The
Request also displays (as below) a “Status” field which is a user defined process of creating, processing and
closing such Requests.

2.13 Engineering Change Management

2.13.1 The Requests Window

Change Requests are managed through Adempiere's standard “Requests” system. Requests are associated
with a Request Type – in this example “ECN – Engineering Change Notice”.

A Request is created by clicking “new record” in the Request Window, selecting Request Type of ECN (if there
are other Request Types also in use), entering text in the “Summary” field and then assigning to a
Representative and saving.

The Request then gets moved to the queue of the assignee who will receive a Notice.

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The user can also optionally receive an email. The assignee will also receive a reminder if they are slow to
action the Request. The Request will then be transfreed to his/her manager if not acted on within the user-
specified period.

The default Request Window displays as:

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The Request can be associated with a Product, Business Partner, Order etc and will then be visible in the
Product, Business Partner, Order window if that window is displaying the relevant record.

The example window screenshot above shows all the fields available in the Request window. Users normally
untick a variety of fields that they don't wish to have displayed.

Information is entered at each stage of the Request processing in the Result field. As the Request goes through
each stage of its processing and/or status change the relevant people are notified/emailed.

A report can be shown of each of the steps, who performed them and when. [in the example below all steps
were created by the user 'SuperUser' rather than a real user]

The Requests functionality is far deeper than described about but a full exploration of the functionality is
outside the intent of this HowTo guide.

2.13.2 Attached Documents and Drawings

Any documents or drawings that support the Request can be added to the Request by clicking on the paperclip
atachment icon in the toolbar , uploading the file and saving.

2.14 Additional functions:

Two buttons have been added to the sales order line tab: “Create Production” and “Create Shipment”. They
create production/shipment records for the selected order line product and quantity.

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 3 Adaxa's Offices and Contacts

Information of a general nature about Adaxa and its services can be found at www.adaxa.com or obtained by
sending an email to [email protected] with a description of the information that you would like to receive. If
you are an existing client and wish to initiate a request for software support please send an email to
[email protected] with as much detail as possible about the nature of your support request.

For all other information please contact the Adaxa office nearest to you.

3.1 Australia
Address: Level 1, 616 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, Victoria, 3101, Australia

Contacts: Office

• 1300 990 120 (Within Australia)

• +613 9510 4788 (Outside of Australia)

3.2 New Zealand

Address: 73 Boston Road, Mt Eden, Auckland, 1023, New Zealand

Contacts: Office

• 0800 232 922 (Within New Zealand)

• +649 9744 600 (Outside of New Zealand)

3.3 United States of America

Address: PO Box 6350 Oceanside, CA 92052-6350

Contact: Office

• 760.576.5115 Main
• 888.575.1489 Fax

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