Production Planning with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations

Before we can generate a production order within Dynamics, we must ensure we have all the details our manufacturing team will need to deliver the item. The product library is established this way. Here we can hold the necessary bills of materials (or formula) and route required to provide this specific item.
We also have functionality in Dynamics to create a variation of these products, be they different sizes, colours or materials. This is achieved through storing variants of each product and associating tailored bills of materials and routes to each.

Bills of Material

Bills of Materials (BoM) are lists of required components needed to produce the released product they are held against. The BoM doesn’t consider dimensions/specification a part needs to be customised to rather just the total amount of the part required.

Therefore, should a product require three sheets of timber cut to 3m lengths we record 9m here and consider wastage, minimum cut sizes and instructions for the manufacturer at a later stage.
When building a bill of materials, we can use other products defined in the system, including stock products or manufactured products. If we use a manufactured product, we begin to build a hierarchy, including bills of material for subcomponents as well.

Routes

Where a bill of material contains all the information regarding material quantities, the route is an order of operations a manufacturer should follow to build the product in questions.
Operations are defined to give jobs to the team. We may set up operations for cutting material, applying a finish or fixing multiple items together. We also define resource requirements against each activity, allowing us to later resource plan to ensure we have both enough human and machine resource required to complete our future orders.
Here, we define the order of operations too, through the ‘next operation’ number, we can specify which jobs should begin first. Here we can also have parallel processes taking place that perhaps only come together in the final assembly.

Looking for some ways to set up Dynamics 365 without having to code? Check out our recent post on how Business Rules can help.