When manufacturing out of a Bill of Materials - list of materials and quantities needed to produce a product - you might have two different types of components to be introduced into the production process of a Finished Good. The components can either be Raw Materials (unprocessed) or Sub-assemblies (units that are themselves produced and designed to be incorporated with other units in a finished product).

But don’t panic: the differences are minimal and are just there to make your production tracking process in Megaventory easier and smoother.

If you are still new at the manufacturing feature and would like a step-by-guide starting from enabling manufacturing in your account until finalizing the production order, click here.

Head to Production > New Bill of Materials and choose the product (finished good or subassembly) you want to produce. Create its Bill of Materials, by including the needed components together with their quantity.

It is time now to create a Production Order. Click on Production > New Order and fill in the location in which you will be carrying out the production process, together with other information such as the quantity.

Once you create it, you will see a workflow. The Production Order might be Approved, In Process, Completed or Closed.

It’s now time to Allocate Materials. By entering the quantity you want to produce (it can be the whole Production Order or just one part) Megaventory will calculate the needed component quantity automatically and will check for availability. The other option is to manually input individual material quantities to allocate.

After clicking on Allocate Materials, the status of the Production Order will be changed to In Process.

To end the process, go on the tabs of each order and update the progress. This allows you to add comments and to go into a lot of detail for each Production Order separately, as shown below.

Multiple-level manufacturing also starts by creating a Production Order. The difference here is that the bill of materials will include some subassemblies/intermediate level Finished Goods to be included in the production process.

By following the same steps as before (click on Production > New Order and fill in the location in which you will be carrying out the production process, together with other information such as the quantity or order reference) you will get a tick box saying Automatically create Production Orders for low-stock sub-assemblies of the finished goods. By clicking this option, you ask Megaventory to make all the lower level subassemblies that are necessary.

This low-stock trigger will look firstly if there is a low-stock alert level set. If there is, the alert level will trigger a Production Order for the subassembly, even if there is available stock. If not, alert level has been set, Megaventory will look if the stock is zero or non-zero, and create Production Orders for the subassemblies accordingly.

Consequently, you will only get Production Orders for those subassemblies that are low in stock, and not for all the subassemblies that the top-level product includes.

Note that in case multiple Production Orders are created they will all be associated with the same Order Reference. This will allow for their easy filtering and processing in the list of Production Orders.

Of course, you can always create additional Production Orders towards the same top-level Finished Good outside of this automated process.