Item details - 1. Operation plan

The operation plan - located on the first tab of the item details page - is the list of operations that are required to create the item. Operations are ordered in the sequence as they should be performed on the shop floor, and each operation is associated with the resources and materials that are required for the given step of the process.

An operation plan specified for an item in Build translates into a Bill of Materials in your ERP system.

The Operation plan tab has two sub-tabs. By default, it opens on the Builder tab that contains the tools to specify your operation plan. The other, General, tab is used to specify the warehouse where the item is stored (for details see the corresponding section at the bottom of the page).

The Builder tab

The operation plan of a newly created item is empty, as shown in the screenshot below. Its Builder tab has just three lists:

• Operations - The list of all operations specified under the Operations menu item in Build. This list is the same as the list of Route stages in SAP Business One.
• Resources - The list of all resources (machine, labor or other) specified under the Resources menu item in Build. This list is the same as the list of Resources in SAP Business One.
• Materials - The list of all items specified under the Items menu item in Build. This list is the same as the list of Items in SAP Business One.

To start building an item's operation plan, just follow the instruction shown in the red frame below: Drag and drop an operation into the frame. Then continue dragging and dropping the resources and materials from the respective lists to be used in that operation. Next, repeat this sequence for all the operations you need to create your product.

You will end up with a list of operations with the corresponding resources and materials. You can always drag and drop any item in the list to a new position if needed.

It is possible to select multiple materials to add, move or delete. Use the checkboxes to select the required materials and then drag them to the operation to add or click the Trash can button to delete.

Your newly created operation plan still has several empty fields at this point shown in red frames in the screenshot below: the setup time and job time of resources and the quantity of materials.

• Setup time is the time needed to set up the resource to be ready for production, in <hh:mm:ss> format.
• Job time is the time the production takes for the resource for one unit of the product, in <hh:mm:ss> format.
• Quantity is the quantity of a material needed to produce one unit of the product, expressed in the unit of measure of the material (item).

In our example, you can see a status label for a material between the Item name and Quantity columns. The same would show up on the Bill of materials tab. The label indicates that an item has one or more other product request(s) open. A similar, but red, label flags if a material cannot be found in the database. The labels are are clickable and display a popup menu.

You can check out the other request open for the given item by selecting View request or, when there are multiple requests open for the given item, go back to the planning board by clicking View requests.

Selecting Add new item above takes you to the Create item screen. Use Create request to add a new product request for the given item. Clicking Relink item opens a dropdown list of items and you can select another item for the given row of the BOM.

If there are more than 50 material lines in the operation plan, detailed information and required fields are loaded for visible items only for optimized performance. 

If a resource does not show in the list, check that the resource data is correct in SAP Business One. The following criteria must be fulfilled in the resource master data in SAP Business One for the resource to be available for the operation plan in Build:

• The Time per resource units field cannot be empty or zero.
• The Res. Units per Time Period field cannot be empty.

You may also be interested in the related articles Synchronization of an operation plan in Build with a bill of materials in SAP Business One and Representation of resources in an operation plan in Build vs. a bill of materials in SAP Business One.

The General tab

Here you can select the warehouse where the item should be stored.

On the Warehouse line on the left, the default selection is the first available warehouse of the following values:

1. The item's default warehouse specified in SAP Business One;
2. The company's default warehouse specified in SAP Business One.

The warehouse settings for resources or materials used in an operation plan can be reviewed by clicking the "expand" icon on the right of the resource or material lines, respectively.

On these lines, Build displays the first available of the following two values:

1. The item's/resource's default warehouse specified in SAP Business One;
2. The warehouse currently selected on the operation plan's General tab.