Rootstock

Production Management Module

Production Engineering

Rootstock Production Engineering includes the following
capabilities: Item Master Maintenance, Bill of Material Maintenance, Item and Bill of Material Revision Control, and Engineering Change Control.

Item Master Maintenance

Within Item Master Maintenance, the Direct Material Item Characteristics are maintained. Key information such as Item Description, the Commodity Code, Responsible Engineer, Lot or Serial Tracking within Inventory, Part Status and Part Type is recorded. Additionally, Inventory attributes such as lead times and MRP policies and purchasing policies such as vendor lead time and Responsible Buyer are noted as well.

Of importance is the identification as to how the supply of an item is ​‘sourced’. Rootstock supports manufactured, purchased and subcontract sourcing. The assignment of the Commodity Code for the item is of key consideration because the item can inherit many of the Commodity Code attributes thus reducing users having to enter every field on the Item Master.

Bill of Material Maintenance

The Manufacturing or Subcontract Assemblies are identified within Bill of Material Maintenance. Each component contains a separate record and standard information associating the component to the assembly can be kept on the Rootstock Bill of Material. Required information such as the quantity per assembly and add and delete effectivity data is maintained on each component link. Required Add and Delete effectivity information includes status and date with optional information including revision and engineering change order. Additional capabilities includes a scrap factor, ​‘issue to’ work centers on the Shop Floor and lead time offset for planning purposes.

Bills of Material are also used in a Standard Cost Rollup to compute the material cost and the subcontract material cost of the purchased (or subcontract purchased) item.

Item and Bill of Material Revision Control

All items are added with a revision (zero). If Revision Control is desired, then the user can maintain status (planned, released, implemented) as well as effectivity date which can facilitate the setting of effectivity status and date information on multiple bill of material component links. Additional revisions to the part (drawing changes, bill of material structures and even routing changes) can be maintained by the user and referenced to the appropriate bill of material and/or routing operations.

Another capability of maintaining an item revision is that a work order’s demands can be generated by specifying the appropriate revision on the work order. This enables the system to copy the correct bill of material in generating the work order’s demand records.

Engineering Change Control

Engineering Change Control is the process that ​‘manages’ the related items’ revisions that are associated with an Engineering Change Order. Revision Control denotes the change and Engineering Change Control denotes the process that manages the revisions to the bill of material and the routings. Since the management of item revisions can be accomplished by the Engineering Change Control process, Engineering Change Control therefore enforces discipline and management control over modifications to bill of materials and shop floor routings based on revision control.

Component and operation changes can be tracked through an authorization and approval process and are logged into an ECO history database. MRP and Work Order Bill of Material Explode will retrieve component records based on correlating the work order’s scheduled pick date to the add and delete effectivity dates associated with a revision. Work Order Routing Operation Extract will extract those Routing’s operations using similar add and delete effectivity comparisons.

All Rootstock programs that use bill of materials and routing master records to ​‘explode’ or ​‘extract’ components and operations contain ECO capabilities. Material Requirements Planning explode bill of materials to create the component demands for each work order and subcontract PO requisition. These configurations are based on the scheduled pick date of the orders compared with the ECO effective dates on the bills.

Shop Floor Control

Rootstock Shop Floor Control manages the life cycle of the work order and the routing that is used as a basis for defining the steps or processes that are required in the assembly and/or manufacture of the item on the shop floor. Scheduling and Capacity Requirements Planning is contained in a separate module.

Rootstock Shop Floor module capabilities include: Routing Maintenance, Work Order Add and BOM Explosion, Work Order Firming, Work Order Release and Operation Extract, Work Order Pick, Work Order Operation Time Booking, Work Order Operation Quantity Recordings, Work Order Receipt and Backflush, Work Order Cost, Rework Work Orders, and Refurbishment Work Orders.

Routing Maintenance

Before defining the Routing, the labor grades, departments, work centers, machine master files and processes must be defined by the manufacturing engineer (and cost accountant when denoting the labor grades and departmental standard labor and overhead rates). Those master files having been defined, a Routing can be established for each item.

The Routing will be comprised of a series of steps (i.e. operations). Each operation will denote the work center, machine (if appropriate), labor grade and process – and the time it takes to do a unit or a batch of work. These times can be a) setup, or b) labor assembly or c) machine time. An operation can also be identified as an ​‘outside operation’ where the assembly is sent to a vendor for additional processing. For those organizations that want to control the operation’s effectivity date (e.g. the ability to phase in/out certain operations) by item revision or by change order, this capability is also provided.

The Routing can be defined at an item grouping level so that one isn’t required to develop a specific routing for each item yet can still gain the benefit of shop floor operation tracking for a given work order. Routings are also used in a Standard Cost Rollup to compute the labor, direct labor overhead, fringe overhead, machine overhead and subcontract labor cost components of the standard cost of the manufactured item.

Work Order Add and BOM Explosion

Typically the work order is added by MRP and then firmed by the material planner. However, the capability exists to manually add the Work Order in the Work Order Work Bench at a ​‘firmed’ status. The user only needs to denote the Item, the Project (if project control is active), the Due Date and the Quantity (and if this is a special type of work order termed ​‘rework order’ or ​‘refurb order’).

The Work Order Work Bench enables the user to explode the Bill of Material. This process will use the derived scheduled pick date of the components and retrieve the effective bill of material and create work order demands, one for each component. The work order demand quantity required is calculated by multiplying the bill of material quantity per by the work order supply quantity required. There is additional capability to get bill of material ​‘override’ information that will denote which work center components should be issued to, so that the work order demand will be added with work center ​‘issued to’ information. (Operation Extract – below will link that work order demand to a work order operation). By using this capability the user can control the timing when material is move to the shop floor (only move it to the floor when needed in the manufacturing process).

Work Order Firm

Planned work orders generated by MRP can be firmed by the material planner. This action will indicate that the planner has taken control of this order and insure that MRP will not delete or modify this work order in the next planning run. MRP may make suggestions to the planner of required changes.

Work Order Release and Work Order Operation Extract

Prior to picking the material from stock, the work order is ​‘released’ which is an indication that Production Control now supervises the management of the work order. As part of the work order release process, the work order operation extract will create the work order operations from the effective routing. If there are any work order component demands that designate that components are to be issued to the work center, as part of this extract the work order component demand will be linked to a work order operation.

Work Order Pick

The next step in the process is the Pick Process of components from stores. Production Control will denote that the work order is to be picked and a work order pick list for all components that are not backflushed will be made available to the store room for picking and sending to the shop floor. Stores will also record the quantity issued.

Work Order Time Booking

The direct laborer can record the times spent on an operation. These times are recorded in terms of hours (or fractions of hours). Machine times can also be recorded where appropriate.

Work Order Quantity Recordings

The quantity completed and moved to the next operation can be recorded. Based on the routing operation indicators, one transaction could be used to record both a ​‘complete and move’ or one transaction can be used to record the ​‘complete’ and a second to record the ​‘move’.

Work Order Receipt and Backflush

The quantity that is completed at the last operation and is received into inventory is the Work Order Receipt. For those work order component demands identified as backflush items, the appropriate ​‘work order demand issue’ from inventory will automatically be done as part of the work order receipt.

Work Order Cost

The work order contains all of the costs associated with material component issues and labor and machine time recordings. In a standard cost environment, the work order close process will compute the work order variance.