Production Families
Production Families are a feature of Production Management, which is included in the Premium Business Central license. It is designed to produce multiple products (co-products) from a single run of production. The routing of the family is shared by all members, and although each his it's own BOM - usually it would be such that the total material quantity on the BOMs of all members of the family would add up to one "unit" of the raw material.
Example: if a 4 x 8 foot sheet of steel produces a production family, then doing the math of the quantities and items produced by a family in one "run" would add up to 4608 square inches or 32 square feet, which is exactly the surface area of a 4 x 8 foot sheet.
Who Uses Production Families
Production families are more likely to be used in a make-to-stock or make-to-order manufacturing environment than they are in most others. In general you'll see them in low mix, high volume rather than high mix, low volume. They work best when a single raw material (or common materials mix) are used to make multiple finished parts. Here are some examples I've seen of this kind of feature in use:
- Cutting many parts on a plasma cutter from one sheet
- Stamping 2 or more distinct parts during the same hit of a die
- Cutting two parts at once (often a top and bottom or a left and right) on a CNC machine
- Extruding two different profiles from the same die and same recipe (for plastic) or billet (for metal).
In some ERP systems these can be called co-products as well.
Some Best Practices using Production Families
I've seen production families used for activities like cutting multiple parts from a single sheet on a plasma or laser cutter. This works pretty well when you are willing to work with a multi-level BOM. When a company tries to flatten their BOM (have all their components on a single - or too few - levels of BOM) you would not use a family.
Likewise when the sheet cut in a laser cutter is constantly reconfigured to optimize for the layout (you don't have a standard reliable pattern you cut) this would not work for a production family.
Production families expect to produce the multiple finished goods in a single step. That means that it's not expected that following that step or related steps, the parts will then "split" and proceed in different directions (except as components for the higher level of a multi-level BOM stucture).
You create a single Routing to be shared for the production family you are creating. You then assign multiple items to be made simultaneously off that one routing, which will have their "normal' BOM.
it looks like this
There is a common routing on the family (since generally the process is done all at once by one machine or cell) and then there are multiple parts and how many of those parts are made per routing "run".
In my example I have a routing that involves a stamping press hitting a 4' x 8' sheet of stainless steel and this punches out 2 x Left and 2 x Right handed parts per operation. So when the run time is calculated - which is .25 Minutes per - that means every 15 seconds I can make 2 Stamped Left Parts and 2 Stamped Right Parts.
This makes sense if the 2 parts have the same raw material(s) on the BOM. In this case they actually share the same BOM because the two parts are mirror images of each other and use exactly the same amount of material.
Microsoft does not document how the costs of the routing are pro-rated between items. I believe it is based on the quantities of the sub-items produced, and there is no out of the box mechanism to change that. So for instance if you have 95% of the material used on the first item, and 5% used to make the second item, then the routing cost would still be split 50/50 which you might not want. This is something you should confirm through testing before you use a family. Please leave feedback if you find this does not work.
Real World examples for Product Families in Dynamics Manufacturing
The primary advantage of using the Production Family is that I can create one family production order that has two lines by choosing the source type of family and a source number which is a family.
This lets me schedule the single routing even though it makes 2 items. In my case I am making 100 of the family (the 100 now refers to how many "stamps" the press will run) - which will produce 200 of each of the Left and Right items. In a schedule I will only see one scheduled operation combined for the two lines.
Here are some real world examples when you should use a production family. You will notice most originate from the same raw material or BOM.
- Slitting coils of steel in which one master coil in one slitting process will produce 2 or more slit coils that are smaller.
- Automotive stamping such as in my example where one strike of the die produces 2 or more items.
- A foundry or injection molding where pouring or injecting into one mold will produce 2 or more finished items (often in quantities such as 8 of item 1 and 4 of item 2).
- Cutting lengths of steel or other product where one cut (eg: cutting a 12 foot piece of steel) will produce 2 parts (eg: a 8 foot and 4 foot piece) which are now new part IDs.
- Using a plasma cutter to cut a single sheet of steel or other material into many smaller pieces
- Using a CNC routing table or saw to cut wood sheets into many other smaller pieces.
- Running extrusion through a specific die that outputs multiple profiles simultaneously.
To repeat myself, you're going to use a family where one operation is performed (cutting, stamping, injection molding) and many parts will result.
When not to use Production Families in Business Central
There are times when using production families will introduce a lot more work and likely not be very efficient for you. As a rule it's going to happen where the scheduling of the equipment is not that important. If you don't have to schedule the work center in question (that is scheduling it to do specific work is inefficient compared to how easy it is to do the work) you'd skip using a family.
In these examples the output of the family would be a sub-component used later, not a finished item (or nearly finished item).
Here are two examples where I would probably not use them.
- A manual operation like cutting material for a job. If a cut list sent to a cutting department would do, then just add the raw material to the end item.
Eg: I am making a ladder. I need either 8 foot, 10 foot, 12 foot or 20 foot ladder risers depending on the size of the ladder. I would make the 8 foot and 12 foot pieces from single 20 foot pieces, but it would just be easier to add the 8 feet x 2 or 12 feet x 2 to the BOM of the ladders themselves and send a cut sheet to the saw department rather than create and schedule a family.
- I am cutting material on a plasma cutter, in a high mix environment (so lots of different shapes), which is not a bottleneck, and where engineering will regularly run a nesting process and so the family will constantly change and be very hard to manage.
In this case I would add the number of pounds or square inches of sheet required to a higher level BOM (similar to the ladder) and an approximate amount of time for the plasma cutter for just that one part, and let the plasma cutting department cut as needed without a family order.
In the second example you could technically create excel spreadsheets and upload to create "single use" families, but that would take a lot of time and energy for very little value.
Conclusion
We need to improve production families as they are powerful but lack all the features that competitors have. Here are some suggestions to vote for. You can log in with your Microsoft account to vote.
