Bills of Material

Oracle Manufacturing and Oracle Order Management use bills of material to store lists of items that are associated with a parent item and information about how each item is related to its parent. Oracle Manufacturing supports standard, model, option class, and planning bills of material.

Bill of Material Types

Standard Bill of Material

A standard bill of material is the most common type of bill and lists the mandatory components, the required quantity of each component, and information to control work in process, material planning, and other Oracle Manufacturing functions. Examples include bills for manufacturing assemblies, pick-to-order bills, kit bills, and phantoms.

A configuration bill (a type of standard bill) is a set of option choices made from a model bill that comprise a buildable, sellable product. Configuration items and bills are automatically created from model bills after a customer chooses options on a sales order. Or, you can manually create configuration bills by choosing options directly from a model bill.

Model Bill of Material

A model bill of material defines the list of options and option classes you can choose in Oracle Order Management to order a configuration. A model bill also specifies mandatory components or included items that are required for each configuration of that model. You do not order or build the model itself: you order and build configurations of the model. A model bill can be either assemble-to-order or pick-to-order.

Option Class Bill of Material

An option class is an item that groups optional components on a bill. An option class is an item that becomes a level in your model bill of material. Option classes can also have mandatory components that apply for all of its options. For example, when you order a computer, the monitor is an option class, and the specific type of monitor you order is an option within that option class. An option class bill can be either assemble-to-order or pick-to-order.

Planning Bill of Material

A planning bill of material is a bill of material structure that includes a percentage distribution for its components. The percentages associated with the components on a planning bill of material do not need to add to 100%. You can define alternate and common planning bills, where the bill you reference as a common must be another planning bill.

Planning items can be nested within one another any number of times. When you nest planning items, Oracle Master Scheduling explodes forecasts level by level and applies planning percentages at each level.

Engineering Bills of Material

You can define an engineering bill of material as an alternate for a manufacturing bill. The typical use for an alternate engineering bill is to prototype variations from the primary bill that produce the same assembly.

You can specify a list of item catalog descriptive elements for model and option class engineering bills. After you release the engineering bill to manufacturing and take customer orders for specific configurations, Bills of Material creates the new configuration item and automatically assigns values to each catalog descriptive element.

manufacturing and engineering items as components to an engineering bill. Bills of Material users can assign only manufacturing items as components to manufacturing bills.

Phantoms

A phantom assembly is a non-stocked assembly that lets you group together material needed to produce a subassembly. When you create a bill of material for a parent item, you can specify whether a component is a phantom. One bill of material can represent a phantom subassembly for one parent item, and a stocked subassembly for another parent item.

Oracle Work in Process explodes through a phantom subassembly to the components as if the components were tied directly to the parent assembly. You can define routing for phantoms assemblies the same way as other assemblies. Work in Process ignores phantom assembly routings when you define a job or repetitive schedule.

You can compute manufacturing and cumulative lead times for phantom assemblies that have routings. If you do not want to offset the components of a phantom assembly in the planning process, exclude the phantom item from the lead time calculations.

In general, phantom assemblies behave like normal assemblies when they represent a top level assembly, such as when you master schedule them or manufacture them using a discrete job. As a subassembly, however, they lose their identity as distinct assemblies and are a collection of their components. The components of the phantom subassembly are included on the job and on the pick list of the job-not the phantom itself.
Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP plans the phantom subassembly using the lot-for-lot lot-sizing technique. Otherwise, the same rules apply to phantoms as for other assemblies. Set the lead time of a phantom to zero to avoid lead time offset during the planning process.

When model or option class bills are components to another bill of material, the component supply type is phantom. See: Two-Level Master Scheduling, Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP User's Guide.

The cost rollup treats phantom assemblies the same as regular assemblies. The phantom is treated as a distinct entity; the cost elements of the phantom (material, resource, and so on) are added to the cost elements of the higher assembly. Also, the full cost rollup process sets the pending phantom assembly burden to 0.