Materials

Materials are the physical components required to create manufactured products (as a consumed resource), and/or the Produced material that arises from a process or sequence of processes such as a finished product.

Material information includes the inventory of raw, finished, intermediate materials, and consumables.

In General Manufacturing the Bill of Materials defines the list of components required to create a finished product and the Materials Configuration area links closely with the Bill of Materials assigned to Operations Segments.

Create a Material Group

A material group is a way to assign and categorise materials. Click on "Manage Material Groups"

Create a Material

Click on the + button next to "Manage Material Groups" to create a new material.

Adding a Threshold

Materials link closely to Inventory. Material Inventory is managed in the system with some control over Minimum and Maximum Inventory Levels. These levels can be set in the material section by selecting the material Setting icon:

Add a Property

Materials can have any number of Material Properties. Material Properties are attributes related to the material that the organisation wants to track through the Scheduling workflow. Additionally, Material Properties are used as an input to the Optimisation process.

Material Properties such as colour, size, grouping or any other quality can be added to all consumed and produced materials.

These properties may be static and used for reporting and visualisation purposes in the Scheduler. They can also be used to calculate setup and changeover processes.

For example, switching between a red colour and white colour plastic in injection moulding requires specific additional changeover time given the extra cleaning required to prevent contamination.

To add a Material Property click the + button and enter the Property Name and Property Value.

You can add as many Material Properties as required. Once created, they are available to select as Optimisation Properties in the OptimisationSetup screens.