Include shipping materials in BOM?
Should shipping containers and other material related to shipping the finished product be included in the BOM? If so how would one account for different shipping boxes due to the quantity of product a customer orders – qty of 1 is a smaller box compared to a qty of 50.
jb,
This could be handled in different ways. You could handle this procedurally and manage the shipping material through an accounting system that would make certain you continue to have material on hand. If you have too many configurations, as in the the orders can go out with any number, BoM management would prove very difficult unless you use something like a configured BoM where you can account for a box that say fits 1 versus a box that fits up to 5 and so on. At the time of order the configuration can be put together (with a re-usable packing material BoM) in your ERP.
Thanks…that is what I was thinking. How is something like this typically addressed when you have order consolidation – for shipping containers.
I understand your answer if we were speaking about orders of singular products, because then a BOM/shipping material could be configured based on the quantity. But say the order includes multiple different products and quantities…how is the industry handling this in terms of BOM/shipping material?
That’s a very interesting question as we know we want right-sized packaging. There are so many combinations that it becomes a logistical nightmare to attempt to track these thru BoMs. This is best handled by the shipping department in accessing the size need/requirement and consuming material from stock accordingly.
BoMs can only be best used for configurations that we are certain of. When we start to dive into a myriad of uncertainty we need to come up with best practices that can be flexible without risk to quality and require too many resources to manage.
At some point we need to allow the procedures to take over and fill in those spaces. I’m not saying this is easy nor will it prevent you from a constant review and update but it will not lead down the road to excessive headaches with attempting to manage too many BoM configurations.
The industry is an interesting place and each company would handle this a bit differently but at the core when you have just too many options you would need to have a standard that indicates packaging requirements…. based on those, the box sizes (or quantities) would develop.
I assume that places like Amazon must have some type of software or internal algorithms to determine which box sizes to use, no way they leave this up to a packer to decide with the volume and speed at which they operate.
That said I guess they/we must know the dimensions and weight (at minimum) of each product as well as for the boxes and their capacities. Then allow said system to determine the right box…but not the BOM – at least not when you have nearly an infinite number of possibilities.
I also wonder what is the best way to determine the true cost of the product given this scenario.
Or then they would go ahead using some standard box sizes and fill it with products (quantity as required – A/R) and styrofoam flakes :-)(quantity A/R as well). Maybe you could define on a specific BOM a limit of # of products to be shipped per box size.
Since I don´t know your product scenario this may not be a valid suggestion…
I think I got what I need with the help of you two and this discussion. For what it’s worth my product is customized stationary products – books, cards, other similar things…most of which the customer can define (for example) N number of pages per book (there’s a max, but it could be any number of a few hundred of possibilities per book line).
Hi, jbsmith
We are handling this using different product part #s shipping component X in different box part #s, like, for example (we have different subclasses on the Part Class for each object type):
– Product A1, component X with net weight of 10 in Box 01
– Product A2, component X with net weight of 100 in Box 02
This structure info is then passed to ERP.
Hope that helps!! Best regards,
This usecase is most common for for packaging and labeling process in pharma industry especially managing SKU in Agile
Managing Such bom are to be looked from perspective of SKU management, whether they need to manage in PLM or enrich in ERP.
In AGILE PLM, Final Assembly is added as component to primary packaging and labeling with qunatity (Fixed SKU)
Further enrichment can be be done in couple of ways. But always ensure that rollup of quantity can be easily done for maintaining calculation of UOM and validation of serialization process. this approach is done be defining super BOM, wherer all levels are maintain at topmost level SKU, managing various SKU and KITs that contains Fixed SKU and primary packaging BOM. Just like parent-child relation between primary. this includes final assembly as component in Primary packaging bom.
However, BOM rollup logic will become complex as many primary packaging boxes are fitting in secondary.
Alternatively, establishing relationship in peer to peer between primary packaging with secondary and tertiary OR any higher level will simplify. when it comes to rollup.
Going horizontal is easy. Secondary and Tertiary where assembly bom or finished good is added as component to secondary.
Idea is to constrain vertical roll-up and than proceed horizontally, which is easy for limiter level calculation.
enticing change management process will be easy to control
