Defining Bill of Critical Materials

A BCM allows you to plan for bottleneck items in the production process. Typical examples of bottleneck items are components with long lead times, and subassemblies with a high capacity load for the internal or external production systems.

An important feature in Enterprise Planning is the Warehouse field in the Planning Bill of Critical Material (cprpd3120m000) session. You must fill this field to avoid that Enterprise Planning explodes the dependent demand during a master-plan simulation to a different warehouse than it does during an order-planning run. If a warehouse is specified on the BOM line in the Job Shop List of Material (tibom3610m000) session, LN uses this warehouse to fill the Warehouse field.

If no warehouse is specified on the BOM line, LN uses the warehouse you specified in the Items - Ordering (tcibd2100m000) session for the item. You can also fill the Warehouse field manually.

You can either define the BCM manually in this session, or click the Generate Bill of Critical Materials option on the Specific menu to let LN generate the BCM automatically. In the latter case, LN explodes the production BOM to the lowest critical BOM level on which a critical item can be found. For more information, see Critical items.

Note: 

  • The warehouse must be part of the planning cluster linked to the site where production occurs.

If LN makes a bill of critical material, it takes the effective and expiry dates of the items, that is, the item validity, into account.

You can also generate a BCM for generic items.