BOM question

[Marcelo Hamra <ma...@hotmail.com>]

Hi all,
I want to implement ofbiz for a small company, who's needs are to manage 
inventory of finished goods, raw materials, in some sort subassemblies, and 
program the production. They are not interested (just right now, who knows 
in the future) in accounting. This company buys furnitures rough components 
(not finished wood parts), paint, package and ships furniture to another 
facility, where the products are shipped to the customer.

They have different lines of products, with different furnitures like bed, 
dressers, etc. Some products are differentiated only by the color (a 
variant), but the BOM is exactly the same. In order to ship the finished 
goods, they package furnitures components in several packages. Some packages 
are commons to different products because there are parts that are shared, 
for example between a single bed and a twin bed.

They don't want to model the production steps, the only thing they want is 
to program a production, know how much raw material they need to buy, 
reserve raw material for running productions, and once the productions are 
finished, decrease inventory of raw material and increase inventory of 
finished goods.

In order to model those requirements I'm making a prototype that defines:
1. raw materials: painture, rough wood parts, iron parts like screws, nuts, 
et
2. furnitures components (trundle, side rails, etc)
3. packages of components (1 package with 2 side rails of xx length)
4. define the finished good (1 black twin bed)

I want to make sure if the approach i'm taking to model the catalog is 
correct. I'm defining 2 and 3 as subassemblies.
- Is that correct?
- Should 3 be defined as finished good and 4 a finished good composed of 3? 
3 are never sold, only 4 are sold, but 3 could be replaced if it is damaged 
for example.
- Is virtual/variant useful for BOM definitions? Should I model the finished 
goods and components as variants of a virtual product?

TIA for this great software, i want to learn it to engage bigger deals and 
contribute to the community.

Marcelo

Re: BOM question

[Jacopo Cappellato <ti...@sastau.it>]

Hi Marcelo,

Marcelo Hamra wrote:
 >
 > ...
 >
> - Is virtual/variant useful for BOM definitions? Should I model the 
> finished goods and components as variants of a virtual product?
> 

Yes, it is. You can define the BOM for the virtual product only and 
then, when production is run, the system will automatically retrieve it 
for each of the variants.

Jacopo