Definition
A bill of materials (BOM) is used to define a Product in terms of the amount of individual Sub-Products needed to produce that product.
A product's BOM can be set by accessing Model Manager->Configuration->Products settings as shown in the example below.
This feature is a creative way to model more than just physical relationships of items but other constrained resources such as workcenter manufacturing time.
Example
Utilizing the Sub-Products and Sub-Product Amount, a user can define how much of a sub-product is required or consumed at a Supply Facility for a parent product.
1 unit of product A needs:
1 unit of product B, which needs:
10 units of product C
3 units of product C, which is able to be produced without a BOM constraint.
Facility Behavior
A facility which can supply a product which has a bill of materials associated with it can be interpreted as being able to produce or make that product, given access to the appropriate amounts of the sub-products.
A facility then must have access to that sub-product via an inbound lane or an ability to produce that sub-product itself.
This product, throughout the model, cannot be created without access to the sub-products, so there will be no flow of that product from a facility if any of the sub-products are missing.
Product Flow Summary
The Products portion of the Scoreboard provides an overview of the total flow of the product relative to the total demand for a product. The Lane-Product Flow report (see: Reports) can also provide data pertaining to the flow of sub-products.
The Total Scenario Flow will report the sum of the total demand satisfied for a product and the amount of that product used to produce other products. In the above example, since 10000 units of B are demanded and 30000 units of B are needed to produce 30000 of A (1B:1A from A's BOM), then the total scenario flow reported for B is 40000 units.
Notes
At the time of this writing, activities for products apply only to outbound flows on a facility such that sub-product production costs should be captured via an activity on the end-product or by creating a dummy “production facility node” which can then be connected to the facility which can “make” the end-product.