Many businesses sell both end products and the subcomponents that go into them. Sage handles this through a BOM tab within the product record for each end product.
To revise a BOM, click the Revisions button on the Bill of Materials tab in Maintain Inventory Items. This opens a window listing all revisions including the original (revision 0). Then click New to create another.
Costing
The Sage 50cloud BOM tool includes a feature that allows you to disassemble complex assemblies back into their component parts. This feature can help you understand the individual costs of each assembly and sub-assembly, which can then be used to generate quotes or create sales orders. It also helps you manage stock and production efficiency. It can even help you save between 25-50% in inventory carrying costs like insurance and floor space by allowing you to only order the components you need.
A BOM is a list of stock items that are needed to build another stock item, usually an end product. It can be used to check if you have enough of the required items in stock and to report on any shortages so that they can be addressed by raising purchase orders. It can also be used to analyse post-production margins and costs by looking at each operation individually.
The full Manufacturing Suite offers BOM functionality that combines stock assembly and process costing with the Stock Module, including trial kitting, maximum build calculators and work ticket processing. The BOM Manager add-on from Advantage Services provides additional functionality for BOM’s, including easy browsing by component, calculating current pricing and checking BOM’s against incomplete purchase orders. To find out more, get in touch for a free demo of the BOM Management add-on or the full Manufacturing Suite.
Inventory
If you manufacture your own products or product assemblies the inventory feature in Sage 50 cloud will allow you to manage the assembly process. This can be done by tracking component parts in a recursive build scenario in a special tab within the product record of the end product with costing information rolled up through all BOM levels and visualised on an on-screen chart.
To set up an assembly item start by creating a new stock code in your Sage Accounts database and assigning it the Class of Assembly (you can’t change this on existing codes). Then select Maintain Inventory Items and choose the Bill of Materials tab. This displays a list of all the stock items that make up this product assembly, together with their stock locations and quantity requirements. The bottom of the screen contains a Revisions button; click this to open a window listing all the existing revisions of this assembly. The original BOM will be listed as Revision 0 and any changes made to the BOM will be added as subsequent revisions.
If you have complex assembly processes and want to go beyond what Sage 50cloud has to offer consider a powerful add-on such as Cim50 manufacturing. This fully integrated solution allows you to create works orders, verify production, calculate machine and labour overheads and record both raw material and finished goods stock transfers as well as a full history of revisions. It also enables trial kitting, maximum build calculators and work ticket processing.
Sales Orders
The BOM is a central repository for all the information stakeholders will need throughout the product’s lifecycle. Including as many details as possible helps reduce quality issues, improve productivity and speed up the reconciliation process. Attaching supporting documents like work instructions and CAD drawings to a BOM is also important, helping to avoid confusion and unnecessary rework.
Many businesses sell both the end product and the sub-components that go into it. Sage handles this through a BOM tab in the product record for an end product which includes a full component breakdown that is rolled up through all levels of the BOM and visualised on screen. This is ideal for identifying potential shortages and raising purchase orders to address them.
For firms whose manufacturing processes extend beyond Sage’s simple stock and order management capabilities, an add-on like QuickWorks with its intelligent works order management can provide the functionality you need to improve responsiveness and control inventory. It offers intelligent assembly and works order functionality that combines with barcode stock control, work in progress and production accounting. This enables companies to create production recipes, verify work orders, calculate machine and labour overheads, record assembly builds and manage raw material and finished goods stock transfers. It also supports trial kitting, maximum build calculators and work ticket processing. It is backed up by Sage integration so that the same data can be used across the accounting and manufacturing systems.
Purchase Orders
A new feature within Sage 50cloud allows you to initiate a purchase order directly from the sales ledger without having to leave the sales order detail. This is a useful tool to manage stock efficiently.
However, the ability to track actual costs against end products requires that each inventory item have a BOM in place. For each assembly, the BOM screen displays a list of all components used to build that assembly with their quantity required and available on hand as of the building date. If the available quantity is insufficient to complete a build, the screen will indicate this and prevent you from saving your transaction until sufficient quantities are added as either a purchasing or inventory adjustment.
If you use a lot of BOMs, it might be more efficient to create them as one-off inventory items rather than each individual time you want to generate a sales order. This could be done by opening the Maintain Inventory Items window for a new inventory item and entering the beginning balances for all component parts at once.
Many businesses outgrow the limited BOM and manufacturing functionality that is offered by Sage 50 and may require a more advanced solution to control stock management processes and operations. A powerful solution like Cim50 enables intelligent works orders and stock assembly with full production accounting functionality, including trial kitting, maximum build calculators, work ticket processing, recording serial or batch numbers and barcode stock management.