Bills of Material (BoM). A complete facility for simply defining the materials and components of your products. X~Suite allows an unlimited number of BoM levels, incorporates scrap percentages, phantom assemblies and permits formulas to be entered (sum of relevant components must equal 100%). Reporting of ‘where used’ and ‘used on’ and BoM copy/amend are standard facilities. Routings. Definition of your in house and subcontract processes i.e. operations. Including the definition of work centres with appropriate labour and overhead rates for costing. For each operation, run time (with times per facility e.g. time per 100 items), set-up, move time, number of employees required and whether or not this is a milestone operation can be recorded. Product Costing. From the BoM and routing details X~Suite is able to calculate costs (standard and latest) right up to the product level, forming the basis of stock and WIP valuations. If your production facilities are managed around bottleneck resources, you will want to know gross profit achieved, per unit of critical resource consumed, in each applicable product and X~Suite provides this information. Purchasing. X~Suite has comprehensive facilities for the Purchasing Department – these are described in a separate text and include multiple supplier pricing and supplier part numbers, order schedules and emailing/faxing of orders. Stock Control. The X~Suite stock control system has multi-warehouse/depot capability and, at each warehouse, can show the contents of multiple stock locations and/or ‘supply lots’ for the same product. This set-up facilitates ‘lot traceability’ and serial number tracking. These facilities are described in a separate text and include ‘issue through’ to shortages and stock back flushing i.e. we produced it so we must have used the components. Works Orders and Work in Progress (WIP). Management of Works Orders in X~Suite includes the production of Works documentation (with barcodes if required). Shop floor data collection (SFDC) options are also available. One off orders can be created without the need for a BoM and progress booking can be made to milestone operations i.e. skipping bookings to less significant operations. Information reporting includes Work to lists, late order reporting and WIP valuation. Manufacturing schedules. The production schedule can be set in X~Suite by taking demand from actual sales orders or make for stock – or a mixture of both. The schedule can consist of common components or sub-assemblies facilitating last minute final assembly. MRP. takes the manufacturing schedule, compares it to what is in stock or on order throughout the multi-levels of the BoM and compiles an action list to match supply with demand. The action lists are active, meaning that clicking on an action will invoke the appropriate routine to activate it e.g. raise purchase or works orders. Demand source reporting is available, to peg demand from a particular purchase or works requirement. Rough cut capacity planning. MRP is great for matching supply to demand but it is easy to lose visibility of the source of demand e.g. which customer will be effected by late completion of our works order for component xxx? You also want to be able to answer questions like “When can we have 500 of product yyy?” or “What orders will be effected if I take this new order for delivery on dd/mm/yy?” This is where Rough Cut capacity planning becomes an essential planning tool. It gives quick, approximate answers to these and other questions that many manufacturing systems struggle with. X~Suite does not expect you to search through all of your data to find the really important facts. System Alerts is a facility that enables you to set up rules about exceptional circumstances and identify who to alert by email. For example email the buyer stating that MRP has detected Purchase orders that will be late etc.