Manufacturing gets interesting the moment the product has a sentence attached to it:
Sage 100 Bill of Materials has two especially useful concepts for products that change: bills with options and engineering change control.
Bills With Options Avoid a Bill for Every Possible Combination
Sage allows a base bill to represent the standard product while separate option bills represent nonstandard choices.
The base bill may be Standard, Kit, or Engineering type.
Option categories can then be defined for component lines so the user can select among the available choices.
Sales Order Can Participate in the Configuration
When a bill with options is entered in Sales Order Entry, Sage can prompt the salesperson to select the options required by the customer.
Those selections help define the structure that ultimately feeds the production entry or work ticket.
That is a useful connection because the customer's specification does not have to be translated later from a note into a manufacturing guess.
Engineering Changes Solve a Different Problem
Options describe legitimate variations.
Engineering changes describe how the product itself evolves.
Sage documents Engineering Change Control for recording engineering change notices and implementing controlled changes between revisions of a bill.
Why Would a Bill Change?
Sage gives several examples:
- Error correction
- Cost reduction
- Design improvements
- Quality improvements
- Changes in material specifications
Those are ordinary manufacturing realities.
The Old Structure Does Not Have to Disappear
Sage documents effective dating for additions and deletions while retaining bill configurations on file.
That matters because the product that was valid last year may not be the product that is valid today, and the system may still need to understand both.
Options and Revisions Answer Different Questions
A useful way to think about it:
Options: Which valid version does this customer want?
Engineering change: What is the valid version of this product now?
Those are different questions, and Sage provides different structures for answering them.