Assembly Planning

You can use the Assembly Planning module to plan the assembly of product variants, and to generate assembly orders in Assembly Control. Assembly Planning does this for assembly lines in a mixed model flow production environment, which is characterized by high volumes, and many variants of complex products.

  • Sales order entry

    Sales orders are entered in Order Management for sold products. A product variant is created at sales order entry. By using Product Configuration, the product variant can be configured.

  • Engineering and product configuration

    Product structures can be defined in Assembly Planning, an external system, or using the Product Configurator in Product Configuration. You can define generic end items, such as a car.

  • Product variants

    A unique configuration of a configurable item. The variant results from the configuration process and includes information such as featured options, components, and operations.

    A product variant is created on sales order entry. You can reuse a product variant on a different sales order.

  • Flattened parts

    The content of every module is stored in the flattened parts. This is a one-level BOM that consists of all the assembly parts. You can define the flattened assembly parts in Assembly Planning, from Engineering Data Management, or import them from an external PDM system.

  • Assembly parts requirements calculation

    The assembly parts requirements calculation process calculates the lower level requirements and sends those requirements to Enterprise Planning. The product variant structure and related flattened assembly parts are input for the assembly part requirements calculation.

  • Assembly order generation

    Assembly orders are generated and sent to the Assembly Control module. During the generation process, product variant demand, product variant structure and related flattened assembly parts and operations are retrieved.

  • Refresh/freeze assembly orders

    Assembly orders are frozen within a certain time fence and at the same time, the content of the assembly order is refreshed. You can also manually refresh orders before they are frozen.

  • Unit and date effectivity

    Unit effectivity is a method to control the validity of variations on an end item. You can use unit effectivity for pegging purposes, or to model exceptions from a standard end item, so that you can make variations without having to define separate item codes. As a result, you do not need to maintain separate BOMs for every combination of variations. End items can be, for example, airplanes or touring cars. The deviations consist of relatively small variations of the end item. For example, fitting red seats instead of blue ones, or a special type of radar, or air-conditioning, in an otherwise standard type of airplane.

    You can use unit effectivity for minor changes to a small subset of the end item that results from customer request, engineering, or production.

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