Workflows

Workflows are part of the Bill of Materials record related to an item.  They allow you to define the steps to follow when manufacturing your product.

After setting up your work centers, you can add, edit, delete, and re-arrange the workflow steps on the Bill of Materials screen.  The estimated hours field is useful for you to get a sense of how long a batch of parts should take to run through the manufacturing step.  When OfficeBooks introduces its production scheduling tools, they will rely on the estimated hours in your workflow definitions as well as the "Daily hours" you define by work center to map out your production plan.

After you define your workflow, you can link subcomponents on your Bill of Materials to specific steps in your workflow.  This will be reflected on the PDF copy of your work orders.

Work Centers and Tools

What are Work Centers?


Conceptually, Work Centers are possible steps in your manufacturing process.  Typically work centers are defined as specific machines, or processes.  In the image above, you see an example of a typical set of Work Centers.  Work Centers are the basic building blocks for workflows.

In the work center definition, you can set the number of hours the work center is available per day.  This information will be used by the production scheduling component of OfficeBooks (which will be available in a later release).

Tools
Tools can be assigned to steps in a workflow.  By identifying all your tools and assigning them to steps in  workflows, you can reduce the set-up time at workstations and increase your manufacturing efficiency.  Defining tools is optional.  If it overcomplicates things for you, skip it!  You can always define them later (or never, it's up to you).

Creating a Bill of Materials (BOM)

Note:  Looking for a way to sell a group of products at the same time?  Product bundles (or packages) is a feature that is in development.  Bills of Material are mainly for manufacturing operations.  Read about the plan for Product Bundles here.


A Bill of Materials (BOM) is a list of parts required to build an assembly of some kind.  The ingredient list in a  recipe is a good everyday example of a BOM.

To specify a bill of materials in OfficeBooks, you must first add an item within your OfficeBooks account.  See Creating an Item in OfficeBooks if you need help.

To build your bill of materials:

1. Select the item record of the product
2. Click on the "Bill of Materials and Revision Control" tab to expand that section.
3. Click on the View/Edit button
4. You can define a workflow in the workflow section.
5. Near the bottom of the screen, you will find the components list, click New Item
6. Select the part to add to the BOM from the selection window.  You can add a new item record from the selection window if required.
7. Define the quantity required to build one of the product
8. Click the checkmark to save that item
9. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until you have completed building the components list
10. You can add details to the Manufacturing Instructions or Notes fields before saving your work.

This bill of materials has a multiple step workflow and a simple, 2 item component list.