Assembly control overview

Assembly lines consist of a set of consecutive line stations. The items are manufactured by passing them from line station to line station and by carrying out operations at each line station. An assembly line is subdivided into a number of line segments separated by buffers. You must define this structure in the Assembly Control module. An assembly line can be either a main line or a supplying line.

Assembly orders can either be generated from sales orders (demand), or by your configurator. They pass through a series of statuses, in an analogous manner to SFC production orders. Before you can carry out the order, assembly parts are allocated to the shop-floor warehouses of the line stations. When you have completed the order you can backflush the materials and hours.

When an assembly order is transferred to the Assembly Control module, line-station orders, line-station variants (LSVs) and exchangeable configurations are generated. LSVs are used to reduce data, by combining all the operations and materials with the same specifications for a particular line station.

The orders that come from your configurator have an initial sequence (that is, the order in which they are processed on the assembly line). In Assembly Control you use a set of rules to place these orders and the demand orders in a final sequence. The rules include priority (for example, sold orders have a higher priority than stock orders) and operational considerations (for example, place orders with the same paint color next to each other, to avoid time wasted in changing paint nozzles).

There are a number of important differences in the financial calculations carried out for assembly orders compared with SFC production orders. For example, results are not split into price variances and efficiency variances and there is no calculation of end-item unit costs.