Product information is the pillar of supply chain and retail applications across all industries. In the various modules of a business solution, product-specific information and setup are required to manage the business processes that are related to specific products, product families, or product categories.

A bill of materials (BOM) defines the components that are required to produce a product. The components can be raw materials, semi-finished products, or ingredients. In some cases, services can be referenced in a BOM. However, BOMs typically describe the material resources that are required. When combined with a route or production flow that describes the operations and resources that are required to build a product, the BOM forms the foundation for calculating the estimated cost of the product.

If a company only produces several simple products, production can be scheduled manually with the correct bill of materials (BOM) parts arriving on the production floor, at the correct time, and at the proper resource. This module explains what discrete manufacturing is and how it works in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The fall and rise of prices for commodities such as renewable energy, natural gas, coal, and oil in manufacturing affect the cost of production. In this module, you’ll learn how to set up commodity pricing and stay in compliance for your finished goods.

Process manufacturing is associated with formulas and manufacturing recipes, whereas discrete manufacturing uses discrete units and bills of materials. Process manufacturing is used in manufacturing environments where production is completed in batch or semi-continuous processes.

Engineering Change Management for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management brings structure and discipline to the product data management process and enables products to be defined, released, and revised in a controlled manner supported by workflows. Engineering change management makes it possible to document, assess the impact of, and apply engineering changes throughout the entire lifecycle of a product.

Product data is an important part of any company that uses supply chain management processes. With Engineering Change Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, manufacturers can use strong data management and version control.

Some setup is required to use Engineering Change Management for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. The feature must be enabled and severities identified. Also, you need to identify product owners and configure workflows to approve engineering change orders and engineering change requests.

During the life cycle of an engineering product, instances might occur where the product information will need to be updated, removed, or replaced. In this scenario, Engineering Change Management for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides you with a structured process for making these changes.

Product configuration is a constraint-based product configuration tool that uses the Microsoft Solver Foundation (MSF) product technology that is designed for modeling and constraint solving. You can use product configuration to create and maintain product configuration models and to reuse components and attribute types in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Manufacturing companies need to calculate the costs that are related to finished goods that are being produced such as labor, materials, surcharges, and overheads. You can configure Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to calculate costs of bill of materials of the finished goods in production. Additionally, you can create costing sheets that are broken out by particular cost categories, incorporate routing costs, and even add surcharges and other indirect costs. Companies can then analyze, summarize, and evaluate cost data so they can make the best possible decisions for price updates, budgets, cost control, and so on.

In process manufacturing in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, a formula defines the materials, ingredients, and outcomes of a specific process.

The life cycle of production begins with the creation of the production order, batch order, or kanban. It ends with a finished, manufactured item that is ready for either a customer or another phase of production. Each step in the life cycle requires different kinds of information to complete the process. As each step is completed, the production order, batch order, or kanban shows a change in the production status. Different types of products require different manufacturing processes.

Do you want to get the best out of warehouse management to support your manufacturing activities? In this module, you can learn about the manufacturing-specific warehouse management features in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The Manufacturing execution module is intended primarily for manufacturing companies. It can be used to register time and item consumption on production jobs or projects. Before you start to use manufacturing execution for job registrations, you must set up various production parameters that define how and when registrations are posted during the production process. The settings of production parameters affect inventory management, production management, and cost calculation.

Asset Management is a module for managing assets and maintenance jobs in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Asset Management enables you to efficiently manage and carry out tasks related to managing and servicing many types of equipment in your company, for example, machines, production equipment, and vehicles. Asset Management supports solutions across numerous industries.

Schedules for maintenance workers, assets and other tools are created when work orders are scheduled in Asset Management for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Procure-to-purchase is the first step of the procure-to-pay process. Procure-to-purchase involves the procurement agent finding a vendor and requesting a material or service to be purchased.

The subcontracting functionality in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers visibility of the components that are provided to the subcontractor and also, if necessary, capacity visibility at the subcontractor. Additionally, working with kanban planning and process boards allows companies to make quick, informed decisions to effectively manage demand variations, especially when they are analyzing the production flow costing in lean manufacturing.

Companies negotiate and agree on certain terms to fix the price of items. These agreements help businesses make correct estimations of cost of goods purchased and set a base for sales prices. By purchasing or selling goods, companies might be entitled to receive rebates or gain royalty rewards, which can be converted to a credit note.

The role of the scheduling system in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is to plan the production process so that each operation in the production route is assigned a starting and ending date and time, and that the materials needed for production are available when the operation starts.

In every industry, whether it’s retail, manufacturing, distribution, services, or public sector entities, the ability to effectively anticipate and manage demand and supply for goods and services is crucial for both short-term and long-term operations. Familiarize yourself with the Master Planning feature within Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to simplify your planning process. When you use predefined criteria, this tool enables you to efficiently strategize your procurement, transfers, and manufacturing requirements for materials.

The master planning features enables the calculation of a master plan to occur outside Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and its SQL database. The master planning features also improve performance and has minimal impact on the SQL database during the planning runs. Therefore, it can be run during normal office hours and provide immediate results based on the most recent activity.

The Kanban schedule board lets the production planner control and optimize the production plan for kanban jobs. It makes the flow of kanban jobs transparent and gives the production planner a tool that optimizes and adjusts the production plan for the lean manufacturing work cell. Kanban rules in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management are tied to production flows as the foundation that defines the activities of a kanban. Kanban rules can be set up to support a variety of make-to-stock and make-to-order scenarios. This module explains how to work with Kanban schedule boards and describes kanban types, kanban replenishment strategies, and fixed quantity kanban rules.

Often, customers demand specific requirements for the finished goods results from process manufacturing. For example, in the cheese industry, milk is one of the raw materials that is used to produce the cheese and it can have attributes such as fat content and percentage weight. The cheese that is produced from the milk can have other attributes, such as moisture and age. If the customer requirement is not met, you will either have to rework the process or start a new batch process. To ensure that process manufacturers meet customer demands, you must define batch attributes that reflect customer requirements. Additionally, after a quality check, the finished goods must meet the value or range of values from batch attributes.