Production Order Creation#

In modern manufacturing environments, business-level planning and shop-floor execution go hand-in-hand throughout the manufacturing process of a given customer order. At the heart of this integration lies the production order, which stands as a fundamental element that drives manufacturing operations with precision and accountability.

Production Orders (POs) represent a formal instruction of a customer request: what needs to be produced; how it will be manufactured; and in what quantity. Within the Critical Manufacturing MES space, Productions Orders provide structural data about the manufacturing processes and synchronizes the planning data (Enterprise Resource Planning - ERP) with the real-time execution (MES).

Overview#

This tutorial offers an operational guide that details, step-by-step, how a user can proceed with a Production Order creation in the system, covering:

• Mandatory Production Order properties that must be set beforehand
• An end-to-end process of a Production Order creation.

Scenario#

The case study of this tutorial explores an order of a traditional 20 Cookies Belgas Package. In this demonstration, a Production Order creation for the 20 Cookies package of Product Belgas will be created, with the following delivery and manufacturing details:

• A 10% delivery tolerance.
• Due Date: the order is expected to be completed at the end of the week.
• Priority: Standard [5].
• The Production Order must be restricted when it gets completed and only materials that belong to Belgas Product are eligible to be assigned to it.

For this exercise a Product reference (Belgas) will be used, which that holds a Default Start Flow Path, placing the material of this Product at the first Step of the following Flow:

Modeling#

Before creating a Production Order, you need to ensure that the required table values and system objects are configured. The following parameters must be available:

• A value for the ProductionOrderType Lookup Table,
• An object of the entity Product that represents all characteristics and specification of the Belgas Product. This object will used as a value of a mandatory field of the Production Order;
• An object of the entity Flow which will represent the set of operations that will need to get executed to complete the manufacturing process. Please note this is an optional field at Product and Production Order level, but since it is a mandatory parameter for all materials it can get created beforehand;
• Lastly, there must exist a value for the Units Lookup Table.

Lookup Table Values#

There are two Lookup Table values that need to exist:

• Cookies as a Units value
• General as a ProductionOrderType value.

Product#

When creating a Production Order the system demands that you pick an existing Product from the list being displayed on the Product field of the Create Production Order wizard.

Flow#

Optionally, you can define the Default Start Flow Path at the Product or Production Order level. Doing so, you avoid the Flow picking when creating the Materials that will get assigned to the Production Order. In case the materials are getting created from the Production Order page, the system automatically fill the Product and Default Star Low Path field if the same properties exist at the Production Order level.

Modeling Notes#

When creating the object (Belgas) for the Product that will be used for the Production Order, there are several Product properties that can be pre-defined, such as:

• Default Units
• Default Material Type
• Default Material Form

Those properties can save time if this Product is used in any Production Order or Material, since these are optional values at Product level, but the system requires them to be set when creating the Production Order and the Materials.

Execution#

For this use case, when creating the Production Order, it is important to set the following properties:

You can see a demonstration of the sequence of steps you must perform to successfully create a new Production Order in the video below:

After creating a Production Order, let's associate the Materials.

To associate a set of materials that will become part of that Production Order and which the system will keep track over its process execution, you have to perform one of the following actions:

• Assign Materials
• Create Material

The Assign Materials operation will link an existing material in the system with the Production Order recently created, and the Create Material action will allow you to create materials through the Production Order which already ensures the material assignment, streamlining the material creation since most of the properties of the Material will be inherited from the Product associated with the Production Order.

If you decide to disassociate a material from a Production Order, you can do it by performing Re-Assign.

Below you can watch a video demonstration of three scenarios showcasing the following actions within the scope of Production Orders:

• How to Assign Materials
• How to Re-Assign Materials
• How to Create Materials

Execution Notes#

When performing Create Materials from the Production Order page, certain properties of the Material will be automatically filled out if you have previously configured the following settings and met the corresponding preconditions:

• The Production Order from where the Material is being created has the following properties defined, which will be automatically filled when performing Create Material For Production Order:
  • Facility
  • Quantity
  • Flow and Step.
• If the Product to which the Material will belong to has the following properties defined, they will be used as Material properties as well:
  • Units
  • Form.

Master Data#

This is the Master Data file used to create this model.