Microsoft Great Plains has full-featured Manufacturing suite of modules: Capacity Requirements Planning, Job Costing, Master Production Scheduling, Materials Requirements Planning, etc. However Microsoft Great Manufacturing serves so-called discrete manufacturing market niche. At the same time Great Plains fits to mid-size companies, where manufacturing processes might be categorized as light assembly. One of our clients, mid-size crane trucks manufacturing facility recently outsourced all the parts assembly to overseas partners and concentrated on sales, distribution, leasing and only light final assembly. This small article describes you how you could deploy Microsoft Great Plains Bill or Materials in process manufacturing. We will describe combination of Sales Order Processing (SOP) module to get customer orders, Bill of Materials (BOM) to assembly for the order, Inventory Control (IV) to allocate materials and Purchase Order Processing (POP) to replenish inventory

? Order Taking. In SOP you create Sales Order and you use standard functionality - place order in the batch and then upon the completion you transfer order to Invoice to bill the customer. If you participate in international business, you should take advantage from Multicurrency (MC) feature, expanded on SOP (Euro, Yen, Yuan, Peso, Real, etc.).

? Manufacturing. In the case of light process or discrete manufacturing we recommend you to call Bill of Materials engine upon the saving of Sales Order to allocate assembled part into final product. This is classical Great Plains Dexterity customization, which should be tuned to your specific customer needs and this work could be done by Great Plains Dexterity Source Code partner only.

? Catch Weight. If you are in process manufacturing - your raw materials are purchased in random weight units, and you need to account them in these units: cases, rolls, casks, etc. Typical solution in Great Plains is to have Great Plains Dexterity custom logic to associate the cask with Serial or Lot Number and record it in your inventory in pounds or kilograms. In this case you can return defective unit back to your supplier, identifying it by serial number and make correct inventory adjustment

? POP/Replenishment. Purchase Order Processing has PO Generator to automate replenishment by ABC code, reorder level and other criteria

? Inventory Adjustments. In process manufacturing you have variable input to get fixed output. The simplest way to realize the variances - make Inventory adjustment transactions on the regular basis.

? Reporting. As the solution we recommend is definitely budget one, lacking functionality should be covered with accurate and flexible reporting. We recommend you to have Crystal Reports programmer helping you in pilot project. Be sure that she/he has good knowledge/experience to work with Microsoft Great Plains tables structure.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies - USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer