Inventory Control’s bills of material feature lets users set up multilevel bills of material for manufacturing or assembling items for sale. Each bill of material includes a list of component parts and quantities, as well as the fixed and variable costs for manufacturing, such as labor cost, materials, and overhead.

Inventory Control supports unlimited levels of assemblies and sub-assemblies in a single bill of materials. In addition, Inventory Control provides the transaction processing functions to assemble bills of material and to disassemble earlier assemblies.

Note: When using serialized and lotted items, multi-level assemblies cannot be created if any part of the assembly (master or component) is serialized and/or lotted.

If you are simply grouping items together for sale — and don’t have manufacturing costs or need to track assembled items — you can use inventory’s kitting features instead.

Kitting items are collections of items that are priced and sold through Order Entry as a single item, and are often collected together at sale time — such as a particular computer, keyboard, and monitor combination, or a back-to-school binder, pencil case, and felt pen set.

• Kitting items allow you to group items for special promotions and sell them as a single item. Kits do not have build costs, and the kitting item is not treated as a stock item (so there are no stocked quantities of the kit — only of the components).

• Bills of material, on the other hand, are designed for manufacturing items from other items or subassemblies, and for stocking the new items.

For both kinds of assemblies, you must add the master item record and all of the component item records before you can define the kit or BOM.

You follow these rules when defining and using bills of material:

• Before you can set up a bill of material, you must add item records for the component items and for the master items that you intend to build.

You must add item records for all items that appear on all levels of multilevel bills of material. Each item is individually tracked in I/C, even if it is never separately bought or sold.

• Master items and component items can use any costing method except the user-specified costing method.

• Before you can post an assembly transaction, ensure that the master item and all its component items are stocked at the same inventory location.

• The component items in a bill of material are fixed (you cannot use alternate item components). To build a master item using an alternate item component, you must create another bill of material.

• You can create a bill of material that includes the master item from a different bill of material as a component item. You must assemble as many units of the component master item as you need, prior to assembling the next level of master item.

• You can create component bills of material on the fly while defining the master bill of material.

• To specify fractional quantities on the BOM master, you must first select the ”Allow Fractional Quantities” option on the Processing tab of the I/C Options form.

• You cannot delete an item from inventory if it is a master or component item in a bill of material.

• Decide on the bill of material numbers (BOM numbers) you will use. BOM numbers can be up to six characters long.

• Add the item records for the master items you will create and for the component items you will use when you assemble those master items.

Before you can post assembly transactions, master items and all their component items must be stocked at the same Inventory Control location. If you did not select the Allow Items At All Locations option in the Options form, you must allow items to be stocked at each inventory location you want.

If you allow negative inventory levels, you can use the item assembly process to add a master item even if its component items are not in stock. The costs of the components are transferred to the master item, and you can do the physical assembly at a later time.

If you assemble the same master item from different components (for example, using alternate items), you must set up a separate bill of material for each version of the master item.

The build quantity is the number of master items that one assembly of a bill of material produces. For the build-quantity unit of measure, you can use any of the units of measure specified in the master item record.