Bespoke Manufacturing, Engineer to Order (ETO), Configure to Order (CTO)

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Transcript:

Hi, in this video, we’ll show how MRPeasy helps you manage all types of Make-to-Order production — from simple products with minor variations to fully custom-engineered items.

Easily copy and customize products, handle configurable variations, and manage complex Engineer-to-Order items – keeping you in full control from planning to production.

One-off Production with Customizations
If you make to order a somewhat standardized product, but which is always customized to the customer, then the most logical and easiest way is to set up a base item, which will be used in the software as a foundation for customization.

Let’s say, that this item is our base item.

When entering the sales order, the salesperson can define the customized product in one smooth workflow and generate a quote and estimated production time quickly.

In the customer order, rather than choosing a pre-defined item, we just select “add a new product.”

We will be taken to the “create an item” screen, where we will choose to copy our base item.

When we click “save”, the bill of materials and routing of the base product will be copied to this item. Let’s edit them, to customize the product for our customer.

When we’re done, let’s click “back” to continue working with the customer order.

Let’s estimate the product cost and earliest availability date.

And now, let’s create the quote.

How to proceed to work with this order – from scheduling production and materials planning to shipping – this is demonstrated in our videos about customer relations management and production management.

Configure to Order – Product Variations Based on Parameter Selection
If you have products with certain configurable parameters, which have a limited number of options, then “BOM with parameters” functionality is designed to easily manage all the possible combinations and variations.

If you have such product defined, then in the Customer Order, you must simply choose the desired parameter values, and MRPeasy automatically compiles the correct BOM, with the list of parts and materials, according to the selected parameter values.

Even if your product can have thousands of combinations, the “BOM with parameters” functionality can easily handle them.

How to set up this functionality is described in our user manual and in the “BOM with parameters, Matrix BOM” video.

Engineer to Order – Products Fully Engineered for Customer
For complex products, you can use your engineering design software to import the bill of materials.

Routings can be imported as well. For example, if you make industrial equipment, you might have thousands of components and many sub-assemblies. Importing can be done from spreadsheets or by using the MRPeasy API to create a custom integration.

As the first step, all the stock items for products and assemblies should be imported or entered, which can be done in one import.

Next, the bills of materials and routings should be imported.

You can import several bills of materials in one import.

And the same, you can import several routings in one import.

Once items, bills of materials, and routings have been defined, you can start working with the products.

You can estimate costs and delivery dates in the customer order, plan production, begin procurement, and more.

All of this is demonstrated in detail in our other videos.

Simplified “Make-to-Order” Manufacturing Order
If the products are fairly simple, then it’s possible to make a so-called “make-to-order manufacturing order”, where you can define the list of required parts and materials without having to create a separate item and neither a bill of materials.

To do this, you only need one generic item to represent the bespoke product. Select it in the customer order and proceed to create the manufacturing order.

The software will ask if you want to configure a bill of materials and routing. Choose to continue without doing so.

On the next screen, you can schedule the production times and enter all required parts.

After saving the manufacturing order, note the product’s lot number, then go back and allocate the products from the manufacturing order to the customer order.

Now, in the customer order, you can see the current product status—from Waiting to Production to Ready for Shipment—as well as the cost and profit information.

In this video, we described managing make-to-order manufacturing in MRPeasy.

To learn more about MRPeasy, please see our other videos.

Thanks for watching!

Keywords: Make to order, configure to order, engineer to order, assemble to order