Bespoke Manufacturing, Engineer to Order (ETO), Configure to Order (CTO)

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Transcript:

With MRPeasy, it is possible to manage your make to order manufacturing professionally and effectively.

Whether you make simple or complex products, if they are with slight variations, are configurable, or are fully bespoke – MRPeasy has special functionality in place for every occasion.

One-off production with variations.

If you make to order a somewhat standardized product, but which is always customized to the customer, then the most logical and easiest way is to set up a base item, which will be used in the software as a foundation for customization.

Let’s say, that this item is our base item.

Now, when a salesperson enters the sales order, he can define the customized product very quickly in one workflow and estimate a quote and production time in a matter of seconds.

Now, in the customer order, when selecting the product, instead of choosing a pre-defined item, we choose the option to “add a new product”.

We will be taken to the “create an item” screen, where we will choose to copy our base item.

When we click “save”, the bill of materials and routing of the base product will be copied to this item. Let’s edit them, to customize the product for our customer.

When we’re done, let’s click “back” to continue working with the customer order.

Let’s estimate the product cost and earliest availability date.

And now, let’s create the quote.

How to proceed to work with this order – from scheduling production and materials planning to shipping – this is demonstrated in our videos about customer relations management and production management.

Configurable products

If you have products with certain configurable parameters, which have a limited number of options, then “BOM with parameters” functionality is designed to easily manage all the possible combinations and variations.

If you have such product defined, then in the Customer Order, you must simply choose the desired parameter values, and MRPeasy automatically compiles the correct BOM, with the list of parts and materials, according to the selected parameter values.

Even if your product can have thousands of combinations, the “BOM with parameters” functionality can easily handle them.

How to set up this functionality is described in our user manual and in the “BOM with parameters, Matrix BOM” video.

Complex bespoke products

If the products are quite complex, then it’s reasonable to import their bills of materials and even routings based on the output from your CAD software. For example, if you make industrial equipment, you might have thousands of components and many sub-assemblies.

Importing can be done from spreadsheets or by using the MRPeasy API to create a custom integration.

As the first step, all the stock items for products and assemblies should be imported or entered, which can be done in one import.

Next, the bills of materials and routings should be imported.

You can import several bills of materials in one import.

And the same, you can import several routings in one import.

When items, bills of materials, and routings have been defined, you can continue working with the products – estimate costs and dates in the customer order, plan production, start procurement, and so on – all of which is demonstrated in detail in our other videos.

Simple bespoke products

If the products are fairly simple, then it’s possible to make a so-called “make-to-order manufacturing order”, where you can define the list of required parts and materials without having to create a separate item and neither a bill of materials.

For this, you just need one generic item to represent the bespoke product, select it in the customer order, and proceed to create the manufacturing order via the booking function in the customer order.

The software asks you if you wish to configure a bill of materials, let’s choose to continue without doing it.

Now, on this screen, you can schedule the production times, and enter all required parts.

After saving the manufacturing order, take note of the products lot number, go back and book the products from the manufacturing order to the customer order.

Now, in the customer order, we can see the current status of the products, and cost and profit information.

In this video, we described managing make-to-order manufacturing in MRPeasy.

To learn more about MRPeasy, please see our other videos.

Thanks for watching!

Keywords: Make to order, configure to order, engineer to order, assemble to order