Great Plains Bill of Materials Setup & Customization for Process Manufacturing ? Overview

Microsoft Great Plains has full-featured Manufacturing suite of modules: Capacity Requirements Planning, Job Costing, Master Production Scheduling, Materials Requirements Planning, etc. However Microsoft Great Manufacturing serves so-called discrete manufacturing market niche. At the same time Great Plains fits to mid-size companies, where manufacturing processes might be categorized as light assembly. One of our clients, mid-size crane trucks manufacturing facility recently outsourced all the parts assembly to overseas partners and concentrated on sales, distribution, leasing and only light final assembly. This small article describes you how you could deploy Microsoft Great Plains Bill or Materials in process manufacturing. We will describe combination of Sales Order Processing (SOP) module to get customer orders, Bill of Materials (BOM) to assembly for the order, Inventory Control (IV) to allocate materials and Purchase Order Processing (POP) to replenish inventory

? Order Taking. In SOP you create Sales Order and you use standard functionality ? place order in the batch and then upon the completion you transfer order to Invoice to bill the customer. If you participate in international business, you should take advantage from Multicurrency (MC) feature, expanded on SOP (Euro, Yen, Yuan, Peso, Real, etc.).

? Manufacturing. In the case of light process or discrete manufacturing we recommend you to call Bill of Materials engine upon the saving of Sales Order to allocate assembled part into final product. This is classical Great Plains Dexterity customization, which should be tuned to your specific customer needs and this work could be done by Great Plains Dexterity Source Code partner only.

? Catch Weight. If you are in process manufacturing ? your raw materials are purchased in random weight units, and you need to account them in these units: cases, rolls, casks, etc. Typical solution in Great Plains is to have Great Plains Dexterity custom logic to associate the cask with Serial or Lot Number and record it in your inventory in pounds or kilograms. In this case you can return defective unit back to your supplier, identifying it by serial number and make correct inventory adjustment

? POP/Replenishment. Purchase Order Processing has PO Generator to automate replenishment by ABC code, reorder level and other criteria

? Inventory Adjustments. In process manufacturing you have variable input to get fixed output. The simplest way to realize the variances ? make Inventory adjustment transactions on the regular basis.

? Reporting. As the solution we recommend is definitely budget one, lacking functionality should be covered with accurate and flexible reporting. We recommend you to have Crystal Reports programmer helping you in pilot project. Be sure that she/he has good knowledge/experience to work with Microsoft Great Plains tables structure.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ? USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer

---

Introducing GRML

Creating a new markup language.Introduction.General Reuse Markup Langauge, or GRML,... Read More

Microsoft CRM ? Typical Customizations

Microsoft CRM was designed to be easily customizable. Microsoft CRM... Read More

Microsoft CRM Implementation for Large Corporation ? overview

Microsoft Business Solutions CRM is now approaching the phase of... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains Security Setup - Overview For Consultant

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is very good fit for... Read More

Partitioning, Formatting and Reinstalling in Windows 98

Formatting and reinstalling windows 98 is very easy if you... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains implementation: Restaurants Supply Chain Management Example

Microsoft Great Plains serves majority of US based horizontal and... Read More

Dashboard Widgets for Windows

For a windows user like me, just can watch with... Read More

Troubleshoot Windows with Task Manager

Task Manager is a Windows system utility that displays thetasks... Read More

Know Linux

Linux essentials:It's free for download but you have to pay... Read More

20 Extra Hours Per Week: What Would You Do?

While I was in college, if you would have asked... Read More

Removing Incoming Email in MS Exchange, C# Example

The purpose of one of our projects was MS Exchange... Read More

Anti-Virus Software

Anti-virus software is used to find, remove or fix files... Read More

Spyware, What is it?

Spyware, what it is and what it does. Basically, spyware... Read More

Microsoft CRM for Large Corporation ? Security

Microsoft Business Solutions CRM proved to be reliable solution in... Read More

What is Spyware? Are You Being Watched?

Find out why Spyware Removal from computers is important and... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains Partner Selection: Overview

Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Solomon and Axapta are Microsoft Business... Read More

ERP Software Financing: the Future? ? Overview for Company Owner

In our case ? we serve Microsoft Business Solutions ERP... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains POP: Purchase Order Processing ? Overview For Consultants

Great Plains Purchase Order Processing (POP) module makes up one-third... Read More

Defining OLAP Solutions and Data Warehouse design

This tutorial covers OLAP solutions used by Data warehouses and... Read More

Software Process Improvement -A Successful Journey

Background: For many organizations like ours, the interim target of... Read More

IT Department Skills to Support Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft CRM

Microsoft Great Plains as ERP and Microsoft CRM as... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains: Interest Calculation Example ? Stored Procedure for Crystal Report

This is intermediate level SQL scripting article for DB Administrator,... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Axapta ? Selection Considerations

During the years of our consulting practice, which comes back... Read More

Software: What Suits Me?

Almost all new and major brand of PCs come with... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains Logistics & Warehouse Management ? Implementation & Customization Highlights

Logistics automation is often considered as barcoding extension to Sales... Read More

Five Reasons for Using an O/R Mapping Tool

So, why should you use any O/R mapping tool? I... Read More

Microsoft Business Solutions Customization Options - Overview for Programmer

Several years ago Microsoft purchased Great Plains Software, then Navision... Read More

Great Plains DOS Support ? Notes for Consultant

Great Plains Accounting, accounting package for mid-size and small companies... Read More

Microsoft Business Solutions Products Selection: ERP, CRM, Retail Management

Let's first look at your ERP system selection (without Retail... Read More

Dont Choose Adobe When Working With PDF

While Adobe is the most known maker of PDF tools,... Read More

Run Your Own Search Engine

Our hosted solution allow you to run your own search... Read More

Microsoft Great Plains: exchange & brokerage ? implementation notes

If you company is small or mid-size special products or... Read More

Photoshop Files and Formats

People often ask me: What image file formats will Photoshop... Read More